Government Resources
The Federal Government monitors the professional liability climate from a variety of perspectives on a regular basis. The search words "medical malpractice," "medical liability" or "professional liability" will produce different but overlapping results on the following sites:
First Gov (firstgov.gov) is the U.S. Government’s official web portal. It indexes all U.S. government reports and information on the internet. There are links to press releases, lawmakers’ statements in Congress, Congressional reports, and bills submitted to Congress. Most are easily downloadable.
Useful documents are the policy statement on "Who Pays for Tort Liability Claims? An Economic Analysis of the U.S. Tort Liability System" by the Council of Economic Advisors (April, 2002) and the report from the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled "Do Medical Malpractice Costs Affect the Delivery of Health Care?."
The U.S. Congress (www.house.gov) website offers downloadable policy briefs such as the Joint Economic Committee’s analysis released under the supervision of Vice Chairman, Congressman Jim Saxton available at www.house.gov/jec/tort.htm.
The U.S. Senate (www.senate.gov) Using the search words “medical malpractice” and “professional liability”, this website offers a listing of Senate testimony on the subject.
U.S. General Accounting Office (www.gao.gov) lists reports, most of which are downloadable, on relevant subjects such as the report to congress, "Medical Malpractice: Implications of Rising Premiums on Access to Health Care" (GAO report GAO-03-836, August 2003).
U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Civil Justice Statistics, (www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/civil.htm) publishes recent statistics on civil litigation, including medical malpractice litigation.
Medical Malpractice Insurance Claims in Seven States 2000-2004
(www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/mmicss04.htm) focuses on medical malpractice claims that were closed in Florida, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, and Texas from 2000 to 2004. In these states medical malpractice insurance providers are required by law to submit information on closed medical malpractice claims. Theses claims are typically submitted to the Department of Financial and Insurance Regulation, which provided the data to BJS. The report provides an in-depth analysis of medical malpractice claims, including the number of claims closed with or without payouts, types of medical providers named in claims, facilities where alleged injury occured, severity of alleged injury, court disposition of claims, amounts paid to compensate claimants, costs of defense counsel, and claim processing time.
PubMed is the website for the National Library of Medicine. Physicians and other health care professionals can do literature searches using MEDLINE, the primary subset of PubMed, free of charge at www.nlm.nih.gov. For those unfamiliar with its use, it provides an on-line tutorial. It provides links to related subjects and indicates when full text articles are available free of charge.
The National Practitioner Data Bank (www.npdb-hipdb.com) is the government based data bank that was established to encourage greater efforts in professional peer review and to restrict the ability of incompetent health care practitioners to move to state to state without discovery of previous unprofessional conduct. It requires that all health care professionals who make medical malpractice payments, have adverse actions on their licensure, clinical privileges, or professional society membership be reported. To obtain summary data on the current data bank, click on the Statistical Information, Data by Profession and State Summary on the home page, or link directly to www.npdb-hipdb.com/summaryrpt.html.
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