Question

Discuss the impact of frivolous lawsuits on patients, physicians, the court system, and the healthcare system overall. You may consider a few of these issues in your response:

• the financial cost of frivolous lawsuits to care providers and patients
• how the threat of a lawsuit affects health information management
• how the threat of a lawsuit might affect doctor-patient communication
• how the threat of a lawsuit affects the quality of care patients receive (Negatively? Positively? Both?)

Give specific examples to illustrate your points.

Answer 1

A frivolous lawsuit is any lawsuit that is filed with the intention of harassing, annoying, or disturbing the opposite party. There are various impacts of these frivolous lawsuit on the patient's , physicians and overall health care system.

Some of these are :-

- it negatively impacts the prestige of an organization

- it affects the people impression about the quality of care provided by the hospital . Example - Negative remarks about the hospital will create bad impression about its care and services among the peoples

- it increases the financial cost on the physicians and organisation for conducting the case against the frivolous lawsuit in the court. Example - For filing a case against the person who posted the frivolous lawsuits , financial loss is more .

- it causes increased threat of patients health data in the form of breach , use of patients health information for research purposes without patients consent etc. Example - sometimes frivolous lawsuits are phrased by the hospital in-service members itself to use the patient's health data indirectly.

- posting frivolous lawsuits affects doctor -patients communication negatively because when patients become aware of these frivolous lawsuits against the hospital , they imprint a bad impression against them and does not accept their care and services . Example - when the patient become aware about the surgical mistake done by the doctor ,the patient refuses from conducting the surgery at the same hospital.

- Creating frivolous lawsuits attracts the attention of the care providers towards the issue rather than provision of care . Example - Doctors pay more attention in solving their prestige issues rather than providing effective care to their patients.