Impact of Legal Risks, Medical Malpractice Claims, Tort Reform, and Defensive Medicine on Healthcare Provider-Patient Relationship

This article discusses the impact of legal risks, medical malpractice claims, tort reform, and defensive medicine on the relationship between healthcare providers and patients. It explores how these factors can affect the quality and cost of healthcare, as well as access to affordable care. The article also suggests ways to improve existing healthcare policies to enhance the provider-patient relationship.

Health Policy and Law
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How do legal risks, medical malpractice claims, tort reform, and defensive medicine
impact the relationship between healthcare providers and patients?
Defensive medicine practices occur when health care practitioners deviate from their
normal practice in attempting to reduce the possibility of causing malpractice liability. The
defensive mechanism in health care medicine has shown that it affects health care in various
ways such as supplementing care, replacement of care to patients and reduction of care in
refusal to treat the patients. A key concern has been the increase in defensive medicine is
likely to increase cost band lower quality of health care (Adwok & Kearns, 2013). Tort
reforms do not correlate with outpatient reimbursement costs. Tort reforms in health care are
not a definitive answer to the overutilization of health care resources. Tort reforms can have a
significant risk of financial loss increasing the risks in both the patients and health care
providers. Health care malpractices have been shown to have great concerns on access to
affordable care, high-quality health care service and effects on delivery and medically injured
persons care (Stock, Mahoney & Carnery, 2013). The legal risks involved in health care can
offer financial loss and impact on health care delivery while crippling patients who resort for
legal addresses in solving medical issues.
How should they impact the relationship?
Studies undertaken have supported various avenues and propositions on how these
factors can impact the two levels of care. Enabling provisions in the legal and health systems
so as to identify prevent and offer compensation for any accrued medical injuries is crucial.
In assessing medical malpractice, it is often viewed differently. Medical practitioners view it
as a form of an arbitrary system while the policy stakeholders holders the view that it can
represent an opportunity for stronger incentives in the prevention of injury. Risks
management practices are effective when they are objective in order to make a significant
impact on the reduction of medical malpractices. Further, the prevention of medical injuries
can be effected through targeting systems in the organization rather than aiming at bad
people. The current practices being observed in the adjudication of claims often operate
freely, however, the system is often slow, adversarial and expensive instead of impacting the
other way round.

Improve on existing healthcare policies
In improving the provider-patient relationship, there is a need for enhanced approaches
to shape the overall policy framework utilized in the health care system. The three
improvement son improving the relationship between the provider and patient entail;
adoption of patient-centered care practices entrenched into policy so as to lay focus on
attention of medical practice (Delaney, 2018), aligning policy towards team-based care
process with key focus on establishing foundations for high function teams and high quality
care (Schottenfeld et al., 2016) and lastly changes on tort reforms which focus on meaningful
caps and have none economic damage on the health care offers a crucial solution thus
protecting the key partners from economic losses.

References
Adwok, J., & Kearns, E. H. (2013). Defensive medicine: effect on costs, quality and access to
healthcare. Journal of Biology, Agriculture and Healthcare, 3(6), 29-35.
Delaney, L. J. (2018). Patient-centred care as an approach to improving health care in
Australia. Collegian, 25(1), 119-123.
Schottenfeld, L., Petersen, D., Peikes, D., Ricciardi, R., Burak, H., McNellis, R., & Genevro,
J. (2016). Creating patient-centered team-based primary care. Rockville: Agency for
Healthcare Research and Quality.
Stock, R., Mahoney, E., & Carney, P. A. (2013). Measuring team development in clinical
care settings. Fam Med, 45(10), 691-700.