Plaintiffs must show substantial compliance, not strict compliance, with HCLA requirement that HIPAA authorization be included with their pre-suit notice. In a memorandum opinion in Moxley v. AMISUB SFH, Inc., No. W2023-00220-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. April 24, 2024), the Court of Appeals vacated dismissal of an HCLA claim because the…
MagMutual, a professional liability insurer for physicians and surgeons, does an excellent job trying to educate doctors about how to avoid mistakes that cause injury or death and subsequent medical malpractice lawsuits. The company recently released a case study on wrong site surgery. “Wrong site surgery” occurs when a doctor…
MagMutual, a leading healthcare liability insurer of physicians and surgeons, reports that “[m]edication errors account for 8% of medical malpractice claims among family practitioners insured by MagMutual. It is estimated that about 50% of medication errors are due to ordering issues, including wrong medication, wrong dose or wrong route.” The…
Where plaintiff’s HCLA complaint cited alleged negligent acts that occurred at different times over a period of a few months, the trial court’s dismissal of the complaint as time-barred was affirmed in part and reversed in part. Dismissal of the claims related to the care plaintiff received less than one…
Where an HCLA plaintiff sent pre-suit notice to a hospital and two doctors, the hospital had all the relevant documents, the doctors were independent contractors of the hospital who could only access the records for treatment purposes, and plaintiff’s HIPAA form was noncompliant and only allowed records to be released…
Where there was a question of fact regarding when plaintiff was put on notice of his potential HCLA claim, and plaintiff provided an expert affidavit in support of his claims, summary judgment based on the statute of limitations and a lack of proof on causation and damages was reversed. In…
Every time there is a airplane crash, we hear about the efforts to locate “the black box.” The “black box” is a flight data recorder – a device that constantly gathers information from dozens of sources about the operation of the airplane. There is also a cockpit voice recorder, which…
According to the Tennessee Supreme Court, where an HCLA defendant did not assert in his answer that a non-party physician was the cause-in-fact of plaintiff’s injuries, the trial court did not err by excluding evidence supporting that allegation at trial, even when the defendant did not seek to prove that…
The Tennessee Supreme Court has accepted Rule 11 review of Richards v. Vanderbilt University Medical Center, No. M2022-00597-COA-R3-CV, 2023 WL 4451631 (Tenn. Ct. App. July 11, 2023). Plaintiff first filed suit on December 12, 2014, relying on the 120-extension of the statute of limitations provided by Tenn. Code Ann. Sec. 29-26-121.…
Where plaintiff’s HCLA claims were based upon medical care he received while incarcerated, and his only medical expert had never practiced or studied medical care for incarcerated persons, summary judgment for defendant was affirmed. In Higgins v. CoreCivic, Inc., No. E2022-01101-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Ct. App. Oct. 23, 2023), plaintiff fell from…