According to the Raleigh News & Observer:
The [North Carolina medical] board, charged with licensing and disciplining the 22,000 doctors who practice in North Carolina, has proposed posting all malpractice payments going back seven years as part of a new effort to broaden the kind of information patients can see about the doctors who treat them. About 25 states have adopted similar rules.
What does North Carolina’s health care industry think about the proposal?
[T]he measure has met opposition from doctors and hospitals, the insurers who write their medical malpractice policies and the lawyers who defend them against patient lawsuits…
The hearing Monday drew 32 speakers, with 24 speaking against the board’s plan to post all payments, no matter how large or small, going back seven years.
No doubt some of those settlements involved no wrongdoing by the defendants. But does that mean we should deny patients all such information?
Oh, and another, unrelated story in today’s News & Observer reports:
Eighteen patients who had operations at Duke hospitals in 2004 sued Duke University Health System on Monday, charging that it committed fraud and negligence in connection with the patients’ exposure to surgical instruments mistakenly washed in elevator hydraulic fluid…
Hospital officials cited tests it conducted, which it said showed the instruments were sterile and that microscopic concentrations of fluid that remained on the tools posed no risk to patients.
