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Health Policy Experts Conclude That Health Courts Will Have Major Advantages For Patient Safety "Health Courts" and Accountability for Patient Safety
Michelle M. Mello, David M. Studdert, Allen B. Kachalia, and Troyen A. Brennan
The Milbank Quarterly, September 18, 2006 In the latest issue of The Milbank Quarterly, the prominent peer-reviewed health care policy journal, four health care experts explore the idea of “health courts” and their potential implications for patient safety. They conclude that health courts “will have major advantages for patient safety,” and they urge that demonstration projects of health courts be undertaken as “a means of determining, at relatively low risk, whether the asserted benefits of health courts will materialize.”
The article, entitled “Health Courts and Accountability for Patient Safety,” describes current proposals for the design of a health court system and the system’s advantages for improving patient safety. It states that among those advantages are “the cultivation of a culture of transparency regarding medical errors and the creation of mechanisms to gather and analyze data on medical injuries.”
The article was written by four prominent health care experts:
- Michelle M. Mello, Associate Professor of Health Policy and Law, Harvard School of Public Health;
- David M. Studdert, Associate Professor of Law and Public Health, Harvard School of Public Health;
- Allen B. Kachalia, Associate Medical Director, Brigham and Women’s Physician Organization, Brigham and Women’s Hospital;
- Troyen A. Brennan, Professor of Health Policy and Management, Harvard School of Public Health (when this research was undertaken); now Chief Medical Officer for Aetna.
“This article is a major contribution to the public discussion of health courts,” said Philip K. Howard, Chair of Common Good. “Reliable courts are essential to align incentives to improve quality and contain costs. Medical justice today is ad hoc, infecting healthcare with a debilitating distrust that special health courts would be able to cure.”
Common Good, the bipartisan legal reform coalition, is currently leading the effort to develop models for special health courts in partnership with The Harvard School of Public Health, with funding from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The idea of special health courts has generated bipartisan support, as both U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and the Progressive Policy Institute, known in the 1990s as President Clinton’s “idea mill,” have endorsed the concept. So have many renowned leaders in American health care, including patient safety experts, health care quality advocates, and deans of medical schools and schools of public health. Health courts were recently the focus of Congressional hearings in both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, where bills to authorize health court pilot projects are currently pending.
Special health courts would be devoted exclusively to addressing health care issues, much as existing specialized courts focus on other areas of law: admiralty courts, tax courts, drug courts, bankruptcy courts, and administrative tribunals in areas ranging from workers’ compensation to vaccine liability. The hallmark of special health courts would be full-time judges, trained in health care issues. These judges would define and interpret standards of care in malpractice cases, relying on neutral experts paid by the court and setting precedent from one case to another. Special health courts would ensure that patients injured by mistakes would be reliably compensated, without having to pay one third or more to lawyers.
Click to read the article.
Read Common Good's press release on the article here. (PDF)
Click here to read more about health courts, including coverage of the recent Congressional hearings on health courts.
To see who supports health courts, click here.
To find out how you can help support health courts, click here.
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