Physicians News Health news for doctors and patients.
By Sandra G. Boodman
When Donna Helen Crisp, a 59-year-old nursing professor, entered a North Carolina teaching hospital for a routine hysterectomy in 2007, she expected to come home the next day.
Instead, Crisp spent weeks in a coma and underwent five surgeries to correct a near-fatal cascade of medical errors that left her with permanent injuries. Desperate for an explanation, Crisp, who is also a lawyer, said she repeatedly encountered a white wall of silence: The hospital and her surgeon refused to say little more than “things didn’t go well.” Crisp spent years piecing together what happened. “I decided I was going to find out even if it takes the rest of my life,” she said.
Jack Gentry said he “went into the hospital a patient and came out a victim.” In 2013, the retired Baltimore police officer suffered a catastrophic spinal cord injury during disk replacement surgery at MedStar Union Memorial Hospital that left him a quadriplegic.
But unlike Crisp, Gentry and his wife, a nurse, were immediately told what had gone wrong by his surgeon, who apologized for the error. The hospital covered Gentry’s rehabilitation and other major expenses and paid an undisclosed amount in compensation, all without litigation.
“When hospitals mess up, they need to do the right thing,” Gentry said. “MedStar did.”
For patients and their families killed or maimed by medical errors, Crisp’s experience — in which doctors clam up and hospitals deny wrongdoing and aggressively defend their care — remains standard operating procedure in most institutions.
But spurred by concerns about the “deny and defend” model — including its cost, lack of transparency and the perpetuation of errors — programs to circumvent litigation by offering prompt disclosure, apology and compensation for mistakes as an alternative to malpractice suits are becoming more popular. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore recently estimated that medical mistakes kill 251,000 Americans annually, which would make them the third-leading cause of death. Traditionally, the only way for patients to find out what went wrong has been to sue.
A blueprint for the approach used in Gentry’s case is being promoted by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Called CANDOR, an acronym for Communication and Optimal Resolution, the approach is modeled on a long-standing program pioneered at the University of Michigan. It was tested in 14 hospitals around the country, including MedStar’s Washington Hospital Center and Georgetown University Hospital.
Although they differ, these programs — which typically feature prompt investigation of errors whose findings are shared with the victims, as well as an apology and compensation for injuries — are operating at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Stanford and eight hospitals and outpatient groups in Massachusetts. Despite fears that the new approach would encourage lawsuits, the opposite has proved true. In Michigan, the number of lawsuits was cut nearly in half, and the hospital system saved about $2 million in litigation costs in the first year after the new model was adopted in 2001.
“The whole point of this isn’t to drop malpractice costs, it’s to drive patient safety,” said Richard Boothman, the University of Michigan Health System’s executive director of clinical safety and chief risk officer, who launched the program after a career defending doctors and hospitals. “We need to hard-wire as quickly as possible the lessons of these cases.”
In most hospitals, Boothman said, patient safety experts do not routinely talk to risk managers who handle malpractice claims. As a result, valuable information about preventing errors is lost.
In The Dark
Most patients never learn they are victims of a medical error. A landmark 1991 Harvard study found that only 2 percent of people harmed by errors file a lawsuit. Those who do face daunting odds: Patients lose 80 percent of malpractice cases. Huge litigation costs, combined with laws that have reduced damage awards in many states, have left many unable to find an attorney because plaintiffs’ lawyers are paid on contingency. Malpractice cases typically take three or more years to resolve. In the interim, many injured people struggle to pay for care.
Litigation “is a tortuous process for patients and health care workers,” said Beth Daley Ullem, who spent five years seeking answers about the 2003 death of her newborn son from a Chicago hospital that denied any wrongdoing.
“We later learned that this had happened to a family before us and another seven months after,” said Daley Ullem, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant whose ruptured uterus went untreated for an hour. She said she received a $4 million settlement before trial, which she offered to give back to the hospital to fund safety improvements. The hospital refused.
Disclosure efforts also face stiff resistance from doctors, insurers and lawyers, including defense attorneys for whom speedier resolution means fewer billable hours.
Despite laws in most states that prevent apologies from being used against doctors in lawsuits, many worry that it will make patients more likely to file suit, said Thomas Gallagher, a University of Washington professor of medicine who has written extensively about disclosure. A recent study found that 77 percent of 300 primary-care doctors would not fully disclose a delayed breast cancer diagnosis to a patient.
Doug Wojcieszak — who founded an Illinois-based disclosure advocacy group called “Sorry Works!” — said one Iowa doctor told him that if he started apologizing when things went wrong, “he’d be doing nothing else all day long.”
Insurers are also leery, said Brian Atchinson, president of Physician Insurers Association of America, the trade association for liability insurers, which was involved in the development of CANDOR. “Some states are more conducive to this than others,” he said. “But there are those who don’t believe the benefits outweigh the risks.”
Lawyer Joanne Doroshow, director of the Center for Justice & Democracy at New York Law School, expressed worry that disclosure programs may take advantage of vulnerable patients who are not represented by a lawyer. “The hospitals are in control of it, and it’s still in their interest to try and limit compensation to patients,” she said.
Jeffrey Catalano, a Massachusetts plaintiffs’ lawyer who is president of the state bar and a participant in that state’s disclosure program, says that patients should be represented early in the process. “I think if there’s a good attorney present, there’s no way a client is going to be shortchanged,” he said. “Good attorneys know this: Medical malpractice cases are hard to take to trial. If a client can get $1 now rather than risking getting nothing [at trial] for the prospect of $1.50 later, it may be better to take the $1 now.”
