As a healthcare provider, avoiding medical malpractice lawsuits is essential. Not only is malpractice dangerous to your patients, but a lawsuit can cost you a lot of money and sometimes your entire business. Here are ten best practices to follow to help you avoid medical malpractice lawsuits.
Improve Your Communication
Firstly, you need to take your communication to the next level. Leaving things unsaid or unknown between you and your patient is one of the easiest ways to mislead someone and head toward a lawsuit.
Whether explaining ABA billing or confirming a test result, make sure you communicate everything clearly with your patients, both in-person and through email after the fact.
Keep Everything in Writing
Speaking of email, paper trails are vital in any medical provider business. Not only should you call patients to deliver news or communicate important information and talk to them during appointments, but it’s also a good idea to send an email or letter containing all the same information after the fact.
Everything in writing will remove the possibility of a patient “not knowing” about something and claiming it was never discussed with them.
Transparency
One of the best ways to avoid a malpractice claim is to prioritize having a transparent and consistent provider-patient relationship. Communication loses value if information is left out or patients are put in a position to figure something out for themselves.
Be transparent at every step of the process, and also check back in with your patients to ensure you are always on the same page.
Up-to-Date Standards
Another essential step is constantly staying current on your field’s standards and practices. While this isn’t something new to many healthcare providers, what surprises many is how wide this net needs to be.
Being up-to-date also includes using the newest billing software, for instance, so that there is no confusion about what has and hasn’t been paid and there is a clear paper trail.
Informed Consent
While this may sound obvious, lack of consent is a prevalent cause of malpractice lawsuits. On a basic level, it is illegal to perform any procedure on a patient without their explicit and fully informed consent.
Whether it be surgery or drawing blood, you always require informed consent from your patient before proceeding and ensure they understand what will happen, big or small.
Manage Expectations
As a medical provider, it is important not to over-promise and under-deliver. Each case will be different; therefore, you must be upfront and honest about the potential results of any procedures your patient might undergo and manage their expectations.
Be clear about each treatment, the side effects, and potential outcomes. While it can often be complex, compassion and direct honesty are necessary.
Complete and Accurate Documentation
Complete and accurate documentation is a culmination of a few points listed above. It is straightforward to find yourself in the midst of a lawsuit simply because you filed a document or processed a bill with one patient’s signature missing, for example.
Therefore, make it a common practice to double-check all information and documentation surrounding your patients. Even if you have computer software that automates some aspects, don’t rely on it to always be accurate.
Ask for Help When Needed
This is an action that many professionals may feel “too experienced” to take, but asking for help can not only save your patient but prevent a malpractice claim, as well. There will be times when your regular course of action won’t work.
Instead of experimenting or wasting time trying to find a solution, reach out to other experts in the field and find out what they have done in similar cases. There is nothing wrong with not knowing what to do, but resorting to untested methods and, in the worst cases, “guessing” is a recipe for disaster.
Always Follow Up
Your relationship with your patients doesn’t end when they leave your offices, and following up with them prevents many situations that could lead to a malpractice claim. This step can take many forms, and you must stay on top of them.
For instance, if your patient is seeing another specialist as part of their treatment, follow up with said specialist so that you are informed about the other treatments your patient is receiving. In the long run, following up further down the line helps you avoid any dangerous side effects that may only be noticed weeks or months after a procedure.
Avoid Bad Habits
Finally, don’t fall into bad habits that can lead to difficulties with patients. A few have been touched on already, but ensuring an automated billing procedure is still accurate can save you a lot of time and hassle.
Don’t let small bad habits slide just because they seem inconsequential at the time; you never know when they can turn into something much bigger and possibly dangerous.
Take the Steps
These are only a few ways to limit or even eliminate the chance of a medical malpractice lawsuit. While there is always a chance, taking the above steps will put you in the best position to avoid them.
