Bergen County Medical Malpractice Law Blog

It's the perennial dividing point and line drawn in the sand by advocates of tort reform who favor caps on medical malpractice damages.

And it's wrong, says a Johns Hopkins research team that has examined a voluminous amount of data relating to malpractice payments over a number of years.

Here's a business model that would certainly seem to reward laxity and discourage innovation geared toward a higher level of accuracy and efficiency: Reward mistakes.

And reward them with more money than is the case for delivering a better product.

That sounds illogical in any business field, but it seems especially incongruous in the field of medicine, where mistakes often have very serious consequences. Patients in New Jersey and across the country die from medical malpractice acts such as surgical error and medication mistakes, and medical administrators and doctors strongly tout their ongoing efforts to curb preventable medical errors and thereby promote patient safety.

The Leapfrog Group, with its very special and narrow focus, is an entity likely never heard of by most people in New Jersey and throughout the rest of the country.

That unfamiliarity does not extend to hospital administrators, virtually all of whom know exactly what the Leapfrog Group is and does. Some of them are doubtless elated by the attention they receive from Leapfrog, while others rue the day that the group ever cast its organizational eye upon their facilities.

"Cherry picked and very misleading information."

That is how an executive with a well-known doctors organization terms the marketing tactics promoting robotic surgical systems over traditional surgeries in hysterectomy operations and other procedures involving soft tissue.

According to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), a leading industry group of medical professionals, robotic surgery both oversells and underperforms. Fundamentally, and despite its self-avowed merits, ACOG notes that robotic surgery might actually be related to an uptick in surgical errors in procedures such as uterus removal and prostate operations.