Hospital Malpractice Defense: No Justice For "Shylock"

At Healthcare Renewal we write about leadership and governance in health care that threaten the core values of medicine.

How about governance that doesn't just threaten, but nukes those values?

What would you think of a hospital that:

(1)  Commits an error in the medical care of a doctor's mother, not giving her a critical heart medication, that leads to her severe injury and death, to the point where even Medicare reports the care did not meet accepted professional standards due to medication reconciliation failure and caused the harms, and then:

(2)  Tells the Court that the resulting lawsuit is a  "vendetta" by the doctor who "didn't tell the hospital about the heart medicine" to get even with the hospital (implying he was attempting matricide) for not hiring him a few years prior into an EMR role?

It's quite an offensive tactic, one that invokes the offensive, vindictive stereotype from Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice."

I would put a number (3) in:  that the hospital had the medicine (started by the hospital's own heart specialist) in their electronic and paper records over the course of multiple ED visits and admissions dating back from two weeks prior to as far back as a decade, and that the doctor and the mother herself, not being a dog being taken to the veterinarian, told the emergency room staff about the medicine, but it's really not relevant to the issue at hand.

Shylock, an offensive caricature

Like I wrote, not just threatening medicine's core values, but nuking them.  The people making this claim are sick, poster examples of the worst of healthcare we write about at this blog.  

Who needs core values?

They're also not very smart. The judge overseeing the case deals with a lot of cases involving petty criminals, and I suspect can pretty well figure out when people, including doctors being sued for malpractice and their lawyers, are trying to bamboozle him with tall tales.  I suspect he's pretty disgusted about now.

-- SS