Bag of Worms

I experienced my second Legal review yesterday. This is where the medical malpractice lawyers come to St. Fozzie's and talk about the present cases for which we are on the hook. We explore our liability, what happened in the case, and try to identify any procedural anomalies that might have occurred. We hope to stop that same mistake from happening again. As I've written before, Illinois is a very medical malpractice-happy state and patients here will sue you for anything. Most of the time we *do* make some mistake in these cases. However, in other, more friendly states, the hospital might get sued for $250,000. Here, in Illinois, that same case might go for $3-4M. It's just the way it is.

Anyway, we suffered through a FOUR HOUR case review. No one thought to order food, so we starved through the whole thing. After the lawyers left, senior leadership had a meeting scheduled to review the case notification process. For instance, we had a bad case back in early 2006. The statue of limitations had formally run out, but some weird twist to the case allowed the plaintiffs to refile. St. Fozzie's got hit with a $9M reserve, because this case may fetch $20-25M if and when it goes to trial. That $9M reserve hit our books and made it a bad, bad year. So we want THAT to never happen again, either.

Before we started the legal process review, we took 5 minutes to run down the cafeteria and grab food. It was hysterical, because with her sandwich, Sister Lourdes toted in the 3 lb bag of sour gummy worms someone got her for her birthday (okay, it was me and it was a joke). I was internally snickering for about 10 minutes because with this legal process review, we weren't just opening a can of worms, we were opening a BAG OF WORMS. The fact that Diet Mt Dew was flowing liberally only fueled the ADD.

It went well and I better understand the risk management, insurance, reinsurance, excess, captives, and PPIC coverage that the hospital maintains. However, it was still one of those meetings that reminded me of how green I still am. I have to work *so* hard to understand everything they're talking about. Nonetheless, I feel fortunate to have a pass into such meetings.