Malpractice litigation

Notwithstanding the continuing debate over the future of managed care and the appropriate protections to be included in a Patient's Bill of Rights, the safeguarding of patient privacy and the reduction of medical error have emerged as the dominant health law issues. Displacing even the implications of the advances in genornics from the front and editorial pages of our newspapers, privacy and medical error have left the cozy world of professional journals and political platitudes to demand corrective action. The issue of data privacy already possessed some serious political credentials before the Clinton administration ushered health privacy to center stage by its promulgation of regulations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).' Public visibility was increased by the Bush administration's very vocal dissatisfaction with the regulations,2 followed by its well publicized, though probably temporary, capitulation.3 Only recently has medical error resurfaced as an issue of comparable weight attracting public and political concern. 4 A series of publications by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) have not only highlighted the quality flaws in our current system, but have intensified the debate beyond clich6d calls for action by appending highly concrete suggestions for amelioration of the problem. This article argues that the forces driving increased privacy and reduced medical error are closely related; that they find common ground in process re-engineering and the adoption of technologies that conceptually, architecturally and operationally will