Medical Malpractice What Are The Six Greatest Risks?

April 1, 2014May 8, 2014

Learn what the six greatest risks to medical malpractice are so that your organization can mitigate these risks and minimize any threats to your operations and workflows that may be introducing these threats from the get-go.

First, lets make one thing clear, the vast majority of patients do not experience any form of Medical Malpractice. In fact the error rate seems to only be between 5 to 80 errors per 100,000 visits to medical practitioners. That notwithstanding, if you are one of those who become a victim of Medical Malpractice your error rate is 100%.

Here are six of the greatest risks that may put your organization in danger:

Diagnostic Errors are the single largest area of risk accounting for about one third of all Medical Malpractice claims. Don’t forget this may not just be caused by a direct mistake by a doctor; it could be that the doctor is acting on incorrect information supplied by some other person, but it still results in an incorrect diagnoses.
Inadequate communication between various medical service providers was a major problem in producing claims, it is vital that doctors and other providers ensure that all relevant information is made available to avoid the risk of harm to the patient and prevent a suit for Medical Malpractice.
Incorrect record keeping is the cause of many errors. In fact, these errors seem to be have been spread pretty evenly across the various medical disciplines, so it seems that bad record keeping affects all areas of the medical profession.
Errors in prescribing medication were found to be responsible for 19.4% of injuries according to a recent Harvard study, this hardly surprising when you consider that there is the potential to give incorrect dosage of a drug to somebody and also give the correct drugs to the wrong person!
Gaps in organization or processes It seems that most medical errors are not the result of any one person failing in their duty of care towards the patient, but more in basic errors, in the way the system is organized. Simple things that would never have happened if the system had more safe guards built in.
Exhaustion or being tired A final major factor in producing medical errors (and hardly surprising) is that errors are made when already tired staff are called on to perform extra duties. In a recent survey 50% of doctors and 70% of the public blamed overwork and tiredness as a major course of errors in the medical system.

The above list of potential courses of Medical Malpractice claims is not exclusive, but it does cover the main areas, most of these could be avoided it the Doctors, Nurses, Dentists and other practitioners took more care. But that means they need more time, and time costs money so we find ourselves back in the classic Catch 22 situation.

What is your clinic doing to ensure that these risks are addressed? Let UPS Healthcare help you address these and many other threats today with the latest in trends and healthcare solutions that can keep your practice in compliance with health reform, HIPAA and more.