Litigation and Health Care Providers

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses litigation involving health care providers and how an increase in medical malpractice litigation has occurred over the past 10 years and that the principal cause of this increase was an inadequate legal structure for medical malpractice. It looks at how malpractice claims are a threat to the professional health care provider in all facets of the health care system and for a wide variety of procedures and activities. It proposes a research study to analyze these issues with a view toward recommending solutions that will lead to a reduction in the frequency of litigation while preserving the essential rights of all particles involved in such issues.

Outline
Introduction
Introductory Statement
Statement of the Problem
Research Questions
Background on the Problem
Significance of the Study
Overview of the Study
Review of Literature
Managed Care
Clinical Ethics
Medical Practice Guidelines
What Guidelines Are
Why Guidelines Are Developed
How Guidelines Are Developed
Legal Implications of Guidelines
Responsibilities of the Patient
Conclusions of the Literature Review
Methodology
Research Design
Research Questions and Hypotheses
Variables and Operational Definitions
Population and Sample
Data Collection
Data Analysis
Methodological Limitations
Method Summary
Results
Introduction
Descriptive Statistics
Results of Testing the Hypotheses
Hypothesis One
Hypothesis Two
Hypothesis Three
Hypothesis Four
Summary Conclusions and Implications
General Summary
Conclusions
Implications
Appendix
Survey Questionnaire
References

From the Paper:

"Clinical guidelines and protocols were originally developed to evaluate quality of care and, more recently, to establish standards (Wells, Astrachan, Tischler, & Unutzer, 1995). In the context of managed care in the contemporary period, guidelines generally are used to allocate resources or to assure that the level of quality of care matches the cost. Guidelines may use implicit or explicit criteria, they may be based on clinical consensus and/or scientific literature, or, in some cases, they may be more arbitrary in origin. The degree of input by clinicians varies considerably across applications. Often the protocols or guidelines used in managed care are not available for review by employers or consumers, and data on the validity and reliability of the criteria cannot be obtained except for use in a research study. Increasingly, components of clinical practice guidelines are being used as the basis for managing episodes of care for specific disease conditions."

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