An insurance trade group said they expect an appeal of a Georgia trial judge’s ruling last week that found the state law capping awards for pain and suffering in medical malpractice cases was unconstitutional.

The American Insurance Association said the ruling, handed down by Fulton Count Court Judge Marvin S. Arrington Sr. in Atlanta on April 28, which found the cap on non-economic damages in medical liability cases to be illegal, dealt “a potentially serious blow to Georgia’s 2005 comprehensive tort reform law.”

Read the full article, authored by Daniel Hays, here on the National Underwriter website.

Hospital Corporation of America has agreed to settle 11 lawsuits that accuse a former West Virginia physician of harming patients, a lawyer for the plaintiffs said.

The lawsuits were filed by former patients and their families against Dr. John A. King, HCA and the former Putnam General Hospital, where King practiced from November 2002 to June 2003.

Illinois doctors will get a refund collectively worth $11 million from the state's largest medical malpractice insurer.

The Illinois State Medical Insurance Exchange says claims are down. That means doctors will get credits when they renew their policies. Individual doctors will get around $500 to $1,000.

Read the full article here on the KWQC TV6 Website.

Risk management practices have become critical to health care facilities attempting to reduce liability, and medical provider risk managers wrestling with advances in technology and heightened patient expectations are trying to ensure their programs don't fall by the wayside, experts say.

"Risk management has come to the forefront in the last 10 years," said Paul Greve, senior vp in the health care practice of Willis Group Holdings Ltd. in Nashville. He participated in a session at the Professional Liability Underwriting Society's Medical Professional Liability Symposium March 11-12 in Chicago.

Read the full article here on BusinessInsurance.Com.

The Mississippi Supreme Court will consider a federal appeals panel's request to clarify when the clock starts ticking on the filing of certain medical malpractice claims.

Specifically, the Mississippi court has been asked to clarify how the statute of limitations applies in circumstances "where the alleged negligence is either the administration of a drug by a physician or the physician's failure to disclose about the risks of a drug, and experts disagree as to whether the drug caused the plaintiff's injuries." In 2006, the 5th Circuit overturned a medical malpractice verdict for Barbara Huss, who had sued a Memphis, Tenn., clinic over medical treatment provided during her pregnancy. Huss lives in Mississippi and filed her lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Oxford.

Read the full article here on the CNBC website.

Looking forward to the 2008 PLUS Medical PL Symposium March 11 & 12 in Chicago, we are posting this clip from the 2007 PLUS International Conference held in November in Washington, DC.

In it, panel moderator Angela Williams Russell talks with Charles Citrin, MD,  Susan Durbin Kinter and Joshua Stein about the newer technology of telemedicine, the inherent risks involved, and how to underwrite these risks.

The Iowa Supreme Court has sent two medical malpractice cases back to district court after offering a new opinion on how the statute of limitations can be interpreted. They ruled that the statute of limitations two year window should begin when patients know the extent and cause of their illness or injury, not necessarily when their symptoms are initially diagnosed.

Motivated by mounting medical costs, lawmakers and executives are urging doctors to embrace a seemingly simple way to save billions of dollars a year: prescribe medications online. Officials in the public and private sectors say electronic prescriptions will make transactions more efficient, reduce medication errors and entice doctors to prescribe less expensive drugs.

Although there has been some pushback by physicians who have been working in the industry for a while, however the up and coming practitioners are doing much of this work on-line in medical school.

Read the full article here on Yahoo! News.

According to the Stamford Advocate, a jury ruled that an obstetrician must pay $38.5 million to the family of a baby born with cerebral palsy.

Details of the circumstances surrounding the award can be found here on the Stamford Advocate Web Site.

As reported in National Underwriter Life & Health, the US Treasury Department and two of its offshoots have recommended that life insurers check to be sure that they have enough capital to pay claims during a severe influenza epidemic.