Tennessee Injury Law Center

As Tennessee medical malpractice lawyers, we are often asked to evaluate claims against doctors who practice in the specialty of internal medicine.   (For an understanding of what is necessary to prove a medical malpractice claim in Tennessee, read our Legal Guide titled "Understanding Medical Malpractice Cases in Tennessee." 

The Doctor’s Company, a insurance company that insures doctors for medical malpractice claims, has published a study that looks at past medical malpractice claims against internists.  Here are some of the results of the study:

• 58 percent of the allegations in these claims were related to diagnosis
• 23 percent were related to medical treatment
• 9.5 percent were related to improper medication management,
• 2.2 percent involved ordering errors
• 1.6 percent involved patient monitoring
• 5.7 percent were miscellaneous.

The diagnosis related claims were further broken down into two separate categories – failure to diagnose (79%)  and delay in diagnosis (21%).  The largest number of failure to diagnose claims were cardiovascular disorders, while the great number of claims in the delay in diagnosis category had to do with delay in diagnosing tumors.

Medication errors hurt and kill many people every year.  The Institute of Medicine reports that there are 1,500,000 preventable adverse drug events per year.   The conservative estimate of the costs of these errors is $3.5 billion, not including the costs such as lost earnings and the pain and suffering experienced by the victims.

These errors occur in doctor’s offices, hospitals, nursing homes, ambulatory surgery centers, and virtually every other type of health care setting.

My very first medical malpractice case over 30 years ago involved a medication error.  A drug was prescribed for my client, and one of the risks of the drug was damage to the optic nerve.  The health care providers failure to do a baseline eye exam and failed to monitor our client for changes in her vision.  These failures caused permanent blindness in both eyes.  We won this case at trial but it was later reversed on appeal because of an error in the jury instructions.  The case was settled shortly before a second trial.

Hospitalists are a relatively new phenomenon in the medical field and it logically follows that from time to time these doctors will be subject to medical malpractice lawsuits.  

As doctors who care for patients in the hospital, the growth of hospitalists is the recognition that patient outcomes will be improved if there is a doctor on site coordinating patient care.  This approach makes sense to us – the idea of trained doctors on-site seems to increase the likelihood that patient needs will be met and errors will be reduced.  However, that does not mean that errors will not occur or that patients will not be injured by those errors.

One medical malpractice insurer, The Doctor’s Company, has done a study of the 113 claims against hospitalists it insures that arose from 2006-2010.