When we think of medical malpractice, we sometimes picture a single doctor making a mistake during surgery. But your care is almost never handled by just one person, it is managed by a rotating team of attending physicians, specialists, nurses, etc. When these large medical teams fail to communicate with one another or misread a chart, the consequences for the patient can be critical. The Pennsylvania courts have recently been examining exactly how corporate hospital systems can be held legally and financially responsible when these team-based errors cause injury or death.
Understanding Team-Based Hospital Errors
In a big corporate hospital setting, multiple healthcare providers usually interact with your medical chart. A team-based medical error occurs when a breakdown in the system itself leads to a patient being harmed. Like if a nurse notes a dangerous fever but fails to flag it, and the doctor fails to check the updated timeline, the entire medical team has failed the patient. Since these doctors and nurses are acting as authorized agents of the hospital, the corporate hospital system itself is responsible for the resulting harm. You do not have to prove that one specific person was the cause of the injury. You only need to prove that the hospital’s team failed to provide a safe standard of care.
The Impact of the $207 Million “Hagans” Verdict
The importance of holding a hospital responsible for its entire team was recently cemented in PA law. The Superior Court recently upheld a $207 million medical malpractice verdict in the case of Hagans v. Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. The jury found the corporate hospital liable for severe brain damage caused to a newborn because the labor and delivery team could not coordinate a timely response to an infection. The hospital argued that the verdict should be thrown out because the jury did not pin the blame on one doctor. The courts rejected this excuse, confirming that when a hospital’s medical team acts negligently as a unit, the corporate hospital is fully liable for the damages.
How Hospitals Use Intake Forms to Hide Negligence
Because huge healthcare networks know that team-based errors happen, they actively try to protect their profit margins by keeping these cases out of public courtrooms. They do this by hiding forced arbitration clauses inside the electronic tablets you sign in the waiting room. As Ballou recently explained in The New York Times, forced arbitration is a hidden justice system where proceedings are kept secret and decisions are made by private arbitrators paid by the very corporations they are judging. By burying these clauses in paperwork, hospitals trick vulnerable patients into waiving their right to a jury trial before they ever see a doctor.
Fighting Back Against Corporate Healthcare Giants
These deceptive tactics are not limited to just one area of the healthcare industry. As we detailed in last week’s article, Forced Arbitration in Nursing Homes: How Facilities Try to Strip Away Your Right to a Jury Trial, corporate operators across the medical field use this same fine print to avoid public accountability. At DLP Law, our medical malpractice attorneys challenge these unfair intake agreements in court. We fight to invalidate those electronic signatures and demand a fair trial. We have the resources and aggressive trial experience necessary to hold hospital networks responsible for the negligence of their teams.
Remember: Injury? Call DLP! (570) C-A-L-L-D-L-P.
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