Coordinating care does not raise liability risk, study says

The work done to help the chronically ill navigate the health care system can even help lower a physician's risk, researchers said.

By Mike Norbut, AMNews staff. April 18, 2005.

If you've ever worried about how coordinating care for your chronically ill patients might affect your liability risk, you can rest easy, according to one recent study.

Care coordination does not increase a physician's liability risk, and in many cases, it can help lower that risk, according to "Liability Implications of Physician-Directed Care Coordination," published in the March/April issue of Annals of Family Medicine.

Mark A. Hall, a law and public health professor at Wake Forest University and the study's lead author, said researchers found several possible reasons why coordinating care may contribute to a lower liability risk. Among them:

• Chronically ill patients generally include older patients who are less likely to sue.
• Care coordination should improve outcomes.
• The technology necessary to support coordination should help reduce medical errors.

Hall and others conducted the study under the assumption that some physicians may see care coordination as an unnecessary risk, despite the encouragement by organized medicine and public programs to take on those duties for their patients.

Heightened fears about liability have been common side effects of past developments in medical practice, including the managed care gatekeeper model, telemedicine, and best practice guidelines, Hall said.

"After implementation, however, fears were found to far exceed reality in each of these areas," he wrote.

The study was a follow-up to one conducted through the Partnership for Solutions, a project of Johns Hopkins University and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation dedicated to helping improve care for people with chronic health conditions. The initiative pinpointed legal liability, reimbursement issues, and information systems as three factors that affect care coordination.