Resource Library

Four federal tort reform bills that could affect medical liability law have passed the House of Representatives in the first session of the 115th United States Congress, with an additional medical liability bill having been introduced in the House.^1,4

Patients have a right to expect that their private medical information will be kept confidential. In this interaction, a physician was ultimately responsible for a confidentiality breach — an ethically and legally inappropriate action.

NORCAL’s risk management specialists were asked to provide EHR liability risk issues they were seeing in the field. In addition to the issues covered in the EHR case studies presented in the March 2014 issue of Claims Rx, their list included:

Clinicians and staff will find ways to work around aspects of an EHR system that are frustrating, time-consuming or inflexible. As the following case indicates, workarounds can generate errors, undermine patient safety and result in lawsuits.

Physicians should always consider how patients will react to seeing their own medical records. In the following case, sensitive information was prominently displayed in each office visit note in the printed out records. This issue became particularly upsetting to the patient when her records were released to her employer’s workers’ compensation carrier.