New York residents may have heard about a woman who died after getting a Brazilian butt lift. The 29-year-old mother from West Virginia was injured in a surgical procedure at Encore Plastic Surgery in Miami. After the woman’s surgery, her organs failed because her heart and lungs had become clogged with fat clots.
In 2014, the total amount in medical malpractice payouts in the United States was $3,891,743,050. 40% of these payouts were in outpatient incidents while 46% were for inpatient cases. The total payment percentage by gender was 53% ($2,076,790,450) for female patients and 45% ($1,752,854,350) for male patients.
Thousands of people in the United States are affected by dental malpractice each year. According to the American Board of Legal Medicine, 13.1% of all claims for professional malpractice are filed against dentists. Other statistics show that in any one year, 1.6% of dentists will face a civil malpractice lawsuit. Some of the top negligence categories include:
New York patients who are scheduled to have a surgery that uses computers to assist in the procedure may be interested to learn that in February, a patient’s heart surgery was stopped for five minutes when a computer began doing an automatic virus check. Although the patient, who was sedated at the time, was not harmed, the incident does highlight the vulnerability of such systems to errors that could potentially be life-threatening.
According to studies, diagnostic errors occurred in approximately 5% of outpatients every year in the United States, meaning that roughly 12 million adults are victims of misdiagnosis. A small fraction of this 5% is made up of missed cancers, but it is found that “delayed cancer diagnosis” is one of the most harmful and costly types of diagnostic errors.
