If you’re looking for a new doctor, or are simply curious about your current doctor, you might want to know if they’ve had a medical malpractice claim filed against them. In this blog, we’ll discuss several ways you can find out about any malpractice claims against your doctor or prospective doctor. We’ll also discuss what it might mean if they have had a claim filed against them, had several claims filed against them, or none. It’s incredibly important to stay informed, especially when it comes to seeking out quality health care.
How to Find Out if Your Doctor Has Malpractice Claims
A good place to start when you’re looking up your doctor is the State of Oregon Medical Board. The medical board licenses doctors to practice in Oregon, and they keep track of disciplinary matters, such as suspensions or revocation of medical licenses. On the Oregon Medical Board website, you can verify a current or past license, view a physician assistant’s practice agreement, find any disciplinary information, and any malpractice information. The OMB also collects malpractice claim information about various medical providers. They provide links to other boards or agencies responsible for specialty practitioners. Additionally, you can visit the Administrators in Medicine (AIM) website, which compiles licensing and disciplinary information in its DocFinder directory.
Another place to look for medical malpractice claims against your doctor is in court records. Court records are generally available online, but in case they are not, you must call the County Clerk’s office in the county where your doctor practices. The final place you can search is on the internet. Simply entering your doctor or hospitals name into a search engine can yield results and information about claims they’ve had filed against them. One important thing to keep in mind when looking through search engine results is that, unless you find them on an official site, you might be well-advised to take them with a grain of salt. Anyone can write about negative experiences they’ve had with a doctor, but not all of these will qualify as malpractice. You also won’t get the doctor’s side of the story.
Different Kinds of Claims
There are several different kinds of potential claims you might find when searching your doctor. These include: drug errors, misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis, unnecessary surgery, inappropriate course of treatment, premature discharge, and incomplete discharge instructions. Each one of these medical malpractice claims can be very serious, and you often won’t be given any specific context for the situations in question.
What to do if Your Doctor Has Claims
As you look through the resources listed in this blog, you might find that your doctor or prospective doctor has had a medical malpractice claim filed against them. When this happens, it’s understandably a cause for concern. It is good to keep in mind that studies show that 75% of doctors in low-risk specialties face a malpractice claim at some point, and when you look at doctors in high-risk specialties, that number jumps to 99%. That doesn’t mean, of course, that evidence of claims should be disregarded. It does mean that you should look for patterns. Multiple claims, for example, are a good indicator that you should reconsider the doctor in question.
Contact an Experienced Medical Malpractice Attorney
If you believe you have experienced medical malpractice, you should not hesitate to contact the experienced medical malpractice attorneys at Nelson MacNeil Rayfield. With over 70 years of collective legal and trial experience, we can and will answer your questions at no additional cost. If need be, we can represent you and your malpractice claim in court.