The medical malpractice crisis has smoldered for many years with few new ideas regarding how to improve matters. Physicians promote limits on plaintiff noneconomic damages, but this has been ferociously resisted by the legal community. They argue that limiting remuneration to patients harmed by negligent practices is fundamentally wrong. We hypothesize that malpractice litigation is out of cont...

Recent US nationwide research on malpractice lawsuits shows that the most common cause of medical malpractice suits against radiologists was error in diagnosis (mainly failure to diagnose instead of delay); the category next in frequency was procedural complications, followed by inadequate communication with either patient or referring physician. Risk management is a fundamental instrument to p...

Noting that the risk of malpractice liability poses a significant barrier to the provision of volunteer health care in this country, the author analyzes current state and federal legislative approaches designed to overcome the hurdle, including a changed standard of care for malpractice liability from simple negligence to gross negligence, governmental indemnification of volunteer providers, an...

“Enterprise medical liability” is a term used to describe a system in which health care organizations bear responsibility for medical malpractice in addition to or instead of individual health professionals. Enterprise liability is in many senses a natural outgrowth of the increasing dependence of medical practice on institutional resources and expertise.2 Proposals for enterprise liability sur...

This issue's "Legal Briefing" column covers recent legal developments involving informed consent.1 We covered this topic in previous articles in The Journal of Clinical Ethics.2 But an updated discussion is warranted. First, informed consent remains a central and critically important issue in clinical ethics. Second, there have been numerous significant legal changes over the past year. We cate...