Malpractice: Doctors Strike Back
A Texas Web site lists medical malpractice plaintiffs. Is this effective risk management?
By Jim Thomas

A Texas-based company has adopted a controversial strategy for fighting malpractice suits. DoctorsKnowUs.com offers subscribers a national Internet database that lists medical malpractice plaintiffs, plaintiff attorneys and expert witnesses.

Designed for doctors, hospitals, health care workers, clinics, HMOs and risk managers, the site allows subscribers to "evaluate malpractice risk at the speed of the Internet," the company says. The existence of the site alerts potential plaintiffs that a malpractice claim may place them in a database that profiles litigious behavior. "The result is a powerful deterrent to filing a medical malpractice claim," says the DoctorsKnowUs.com Web site. "Malpractice plaintiffs must now permanently bear the burden of their public claims."

What burden might a plaintiff bear? A recent article in the New York Times suggested that plaintiffs who are named on the site could be "blacklisted" by doctors, even if these patients had legitimate lawsuits. After the article was published, the Web site's homepage added the text, "This is not a blacklist. Many patients have meritorious claims." (DoctorsKnowUs.com says it doesn't judge the fitness of claims -- it only lists them.)

The cost of the service to subscribers is $4.95 a month for 250 searches, plus two cents for each additional search. The cases listed in the database include medical malpractice, medical negligence, and personal injury (other than motor vehicle, negligence, damages, personal tort, civil, and product liability). The site claims to obtain its information from public records and concedes that its database isn't comprehensive, but rather "provides the framework for ongoing addition of medical malpractice/other claims." (DoctorsKnowUs.com did not respond to our email request for information. No phone number is listed on its Web site.)

For many doctors, the issue is not as much about screening patients' litigation behavior as it is about controlling the escalating cost of malpractice insurance. According to Ophthalmology Management magazine, published by Boucher Communications (also the publisher of Optometric Management), the "golden standard" for minimizing the malpractice problem exists in legislation that was passed in such states as California where:

• a $250,000 cap is placed on non-economic damages
• a sliding scale gives the plaintiff's attorneys a lower percentage of larger awards
• a provision prohibits plaintiffs from being paid by two sources for the same injury
• a provision allows larger settlements to be paid in installments rather than a lump sum.

(See http://www.ophthalmologymanagement.com/archive_results.asp?article=86003 for the complete feature.)

DoctorsKnowUs.com refers to malpractice lawsuits as a "legal terrorism being waged" against the healthcare profession. Is screening a patient's litigation history the answer? Optometric Management could find no optometrists who would condone such a practice, although several noted that there are consumer-related sites that monitor doctors' involvement in medical malpractice suits. Most would agree, however, that the site is a desperate measure for what many doctors feel is a desperate time.