*/
NEW YORK – Using mediation prior to medical malpractice lawsuits can often save money and smooth the way for settlement, but doctors, hospitals and lawyers remain wary of it, a new study says.
The study, co-authored by Columbia Law School Professor Carol Liebman, found that mediation has the potential to offer closure to plaintiffs and ensure that procedures are changed in hospitals to prevent recurrences of the problem that sparked the lawsuit.
Yet too often, that potential goes unrealized, Liebman said.
“Change will require medical leaders, hospital administrators and malpractice insurers to temper their suspicion of the tort system sufficiently to approach medical errors and adverse events as learning opportunities, and to retain lawyers who embrace mediation as an opportunity to solve problems, show compassion and improve care,” she said.
The study, published in the December 2010 edition of the Journal of Health, Politics, Policy and Law, looked at 31 cases from 11 nonprofit hospitals in New York City in 2006 and 2007 that went to mediation. About 70 percent of the cases were settled either during or after mediation, resulting in monetary awards ranging from $35,000 to $1.7 million.
Even if the mediation doesn’t resolve the case, it may create enough momentum to lead to a settlement, the study found. In none of the cases studied did a doctor take part in the mediation.
Medical malpractice costs have become part of the healthcare reform debate in the wake of the Jan. 19 House repeal of the Accountable Care Act. At a recent event in Washington, D.C., Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University Law School, said legislative action to relieve the cost of medical malpractice is important, but it’s not going to balance the budget.
Dean Rosen, a law partner at Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti, Inc., and former chief healthcare advisor to Sen. Bill Frist, (R-Tenn.), said medical malpractice insurance reform is likely to play a part in legislative activity this year.
At a Jan. 20 House Judiciary Committee hearing, American Medical Association Chair Ardis Dee Hoven, MD, said the nation’s medical liability system is “in desperate need of reform.”