If a doctor is sued for malpractice, that means they made a mistake. If they are performing extra tests to avoid malpractice, that means they are performing extra tests to avoid making mistakes. That is a good thing.
1. A person can be sued without being guilty in a criminal or civil sense.
2. They are performing extra tests to cover their asses, not to avoid making mistakes.
3. It is clearly not a good thing as shown by the authors of the study.
Most med mal cases are failure to diagnose. That is, the doctor fails to find out what is wrong with you, and you are harmed as a result. If the doctor runs a battery of tests, however, they can properly diagnose the disease and not harm the patient. For a nominal fee, the doctor can save someone's life. This may be bad for the system as a whole, but it is good for the individual patient.
For context, a “simple” failure to diagnose case against a radiologist is going to cost me close to $20,000 out of pocket, and hundreds of hours of my time - not something I do on a whim.
A judges’s admin assistant that I frequently deal with recently retired. Someone asked her what advice she had for attorneys. Her response - don’t file med mal cases because they’re losers, and I practice in one of the top 5 “judicial hell holes” in America.
Common to all these programs is a commitment to provide information and compensation to patients regardless of whether negligence is involved. That lowers the bar of entry for patients and doesn’t pit doctors against them, enabling providers to be open about what happened.
This seems like a much better system.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-denmark-dumped-medica...
No, it means that someone has a story about an adverse outcome that they think can be blamed on the doctor making a mistake; it doesn't mean either that the adverse outcome actually occurred or that it was caused by the doctor making a mistake.
That's why we have trials.
The doctors are ordering the extra tests to avoid the lawsuit being raised in the first place.