“For a good horse to put in a good performance, a good jockey is essential. But a good jockey can’t do much for a poor horse.”
Charles H. Wheeler
Twenty-one percent of care delivered in the healthcare system today is unnecessary. Two million patients obtain infections in the hospital setting- infections that they didn’t have before they were admitted. Forty percent of cardiac patients receive inadequate or inappropriate care. These are all gaps in care that contribute to the 3rd leading cause of death in the United States today, which is medical error.
We need to do our best to identify these gaps in care, and essentially, we can do that during your initial case review. When the patient or the family presents to you, the attorney, you are evaluating the potential value or merit of the case. This is really where the physician needs to step into that room as well, via video conference, to identify the medical processes and policies that may have been breached, and assist in taking the case and moving forward in the legal process, if the case is strong enough.
Essentially, what we as physicians could do is help you select the right case and “weed out” the cases in which you do not wish to proceed. This way you would never have to represent in a case that you felt was too weak to begin with, or probably had no chance of winning. If we put all our energy into the beginning of the case, when it is presented, it will save a lot of time in the end.
You want to be able to focus on identifying and selecting the right cases to represent. Choosing the right case is the most critical part of the entire process. If you have the wrong case, the pieces fall apart, and the energy goes into something that’s not worth chasing.
This is no different than wanting to identify the right horse in a race. You must have the right horse and the right jockey to get to the finish line first.