Our litiginous society

I've known for a long time that there's a problem with the medical legal system in this country that needs to be fixed. However, I recently heard this story that rams home the point.

There was a patient who had multiple medical problems and normally is seen by doctors at the hospital medical clinic. Due to various reasons, usually the clinic is used by patients who have little insurance or bad insurance, and so they cater to many of the inner city population. The doctors rotate there as well, so continuity of care is not always the best, and the patients don't often follow up with their appointments. The clinic is often also abused, with people walking in constantly without appointments and expecting to have 10 different medical complaints addressed in a single visit.

At any rate, for reasons I won't go into, this patient had to be anticoagulated - that is, her blood had to be kept thin with medications so that she would not develop a clot. Clearly a clot can be a very bad thing - it can travel to the heart and cause a heart attack, it can go to the brain and cause a stroke, it can go to the lungs and cause a pulmonary embolism or a "lung attack". So it's important that her blood is kept thin so that the clot doesn't get any bigger and perhaps would even dissolve away eventually. However, as with any other medications, there are risks. The particular medication you use as an outpatient (coumadin) needs to be monitored closely. The levels are usually tested every 1-2 weeks at an outpatient laboratory or clinic, and if your blood is too thin, there is certainly a risk of bleeding. This can be very serious as well, causing yet another type of stroke, or patients can lose so much blood that they become very sick or die. So monitoring the level of coumadin in your blood every once in a while is very important until you reach a good regimen that keeps you consistently at the right blood thinness.

This woman had been admitted to the hospital several times in the last several months for unrelated issues, and each time, her coumadin level was not right. Sometimes her blood was too thin, and sometimes it was not thin enough. They would always get it just right before sending her home and tell her to follow up at the hospital clinic to get it checked out a week or two later. Sometimes she did this, sometimes she didn't. Finally, one particular instance, she was supposed to be seen at the clinic and missed her appointment. Two weeks later, she was admitted to the hospital where her blood was much much too thin, she started bleeding, and bled so much that she ended up dying.

Her relatives are now suing everyone that has ever been involved in her care, including a cardiologist who saw her only once during one of her hospital stays, an excellent medicine attending who saw her once at the clinic 2 years ago, and doctors from other hospitals as well who have been involved. Even though there has been no wrong-doing on anybody's part at all, and their lawyers agree they could win this case, pretty much everyone involved (and their insurance companies) has finally decided to settle out of court and pay instead of fighting this because it would be much cheaper. Just as an example, it would cost them $2 million to fight this battle in court after all the lawyer fees, etc whereas settling out of court they pay the family $200,000. Easy money for the family.

The only point someone brought up is that when the patient missed her appointment, nobody called her to ask her to come in or to reschedule. But is that our responsibility? Patients get a reminder call, and when they don't come in, I don't necessarily think it's the health system's responsibility to beg them to come in. At some point, you have to ask the patients to take responsibility for their own health care and participate.

This story exemplifies one of the reasons why health care costs so much for everyone. The $200,000+ that the family won (which doesn't even include the doctors' time, paperwork, other court fees) is basically being paid by all the other health care users out there. There needs to be some sort of reform within the medical-legal system. I don't have any great ideas, but something needs to be done.