Monday’s Wall Street Journal featured an article entitled “What the Doctor Missed: Using Malpractice Claims to Help Physicians Avoid Diagnostic Mistakes, Delays.”
As the title suggests, medical malpractice claims are increasingly being studied by doctors and their medical malpractice insurers to avoid repeat mistakes. The knowledge that doctors gain by studying medical malpractice claims is being found to be especially important in failure-to-diagnose and misdiagnosis cases, cases which account for forty percent of all medical malpractice claims.
I’ve blogged a lot about how claims that medical malpractice lawsuits drive up health care costs ignore many offsetting gains, such as increases in patient safety that are driven by the work of medical malpractice lawyers. Increasingly, doctors themselves are acknowledging that we can run our health care system more efficiently by admitting and studying mistakes.

This blog is maintained by the Boston medical malpractice lawyers at The Law Office of Alan H. Crede, P.C. The blog neither contains nor offers legal advice.