Introduction: There is considerable interest in triaging victims of large vessel occlusion (LVO) strokes to comprehensive stroke centers. Timely access to interventional therapy has been linked to improved stroke outcomes. Accurate triage depends upon the use of a validated screening tool in addition to several emergency medical system (EMS)-specific factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudy Objective: Malpractice fear is a commonly cited cause for defensive medicine, but it is unclear whether being named in a malpractice claim changes physician practice patterns. We study whether there are changes in commonly used measures of emergency physician practice after being named in a malpractice claim.
Methods: We performed a retrospective difference-in-differences study comparing practice patterns of emergency physicians named in a malpractice claim and unnamed matched controls working contemporaneously in the same emergency departments (EDs), using data from a national emergency medicine management group (59 EDs in 11 US states from 2010 to 2015).
Study Objective: We examine the association between emergency physician characteristics and practice factors with the risk of being named in a malpractice claim.
Methods: We used malpractice claims along with provider, operational, and jurisdictional data from a national emergency medicine group (87 emergency departments [EDs] in 15 states from January 1, 2010, to June 30, 2014) to assess the relationship between individual physician and practice variables and being named in a malpractice claim. Individual and practice factors included years in practice, emergency medicine board certification, visit admission rate, relative value units generated per hour, total patients treated as attending physician of record, working at multiple facilities, working primarily overnight shifts, patient experience data percentile, and state malpractice environment.