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Understandably, emergency physicians (EPs) who believe that allegations of malpractice are unfounded don’t want to suffer through litigation one minute longer than necessary. However, getting “out” of a claim, regardless of the merits of the case against the EP, is often no easy task.
The safest route for a plaintiff is to sue everyone involved in the patient’s care for malpractice and then use the discovery process to figure out who is actually liable, says Christopher Robertson, JD, PhD, associate professor at University of Arizona’s James E. Rogers College of Law.
“And that approach is not necessarily improper,” he adds. If the discovery process exonerates one defendant, the plaintiff is often happy to let him or her go — as long as there is a strong case against another defendant.
Regardless of the facts of the specific case, malpractice litigation is likely to drag on much longer than the EP is comfortable with. “Oftentimes physicians think, ‘Why am I still in this? Why isn’t something happening?’” says Michael J. Sacopulos, JD, founder and president of the Terre Haute, IN-based Medical Risk Institute. “The way the system is set up, it does not quickly adjudicate cases. We can have months with no activity.” Here are some factors that can determine whether an EP can be dismissed from a malpractice claim:
• Dismissal is more likely if the lawsuit is mainly focused on a physician in a different specialty, and the EP is named along with multiple other physicians.
For instance, a malpractice case may allege that the patient had a bad outcome because of a mistake made by a surgeon, and the EP is only...