Malpractice--The Doctors’ Rx : Medical Assn. Urges Use of Computer Network to Identify Patients Who Have Filed Suits

Declaring that the threat of malpractice claims “makes it very difficult to practice medicine,” the Los Angeles County Medical Assn. recommended Tuesday that doctors subscribe to a private computerized information service that identifies patients who have filed lawsuits.

Dr. Mitchell S. Karlan, president of the association, blamed the need for the program on “parasitical professional plaintiffs” more interested in “developing a basis for a medical malpractice lawsuit than in seeking treatment for a medical problem.”

Karlan said physicians could refuse to treat a “litigation-prone” patient except in an emergency or choose to ignore the information. He said the service’s major function was to “raise an alert.”

“This is not a secret or clandestine program,” Karlan said. “We called a news conference so that patients will now know this is going on.”

The service, named Physician’s Alert, will be able to screen a computerized registry of 1.3 million civil lawsuits filed in Superior Court in Los Angeles and Orange counties since 1976 and tell “usually within 30 seconds” if a patient’s name is listed, according to Michael G. Eckstein, president of the Chicago-based company. Physician’s Alert offers a similar service in Detroit and Chicago.

The physician has “no legal responsibility to tell patients he is checking up on them,” Eckstein said. He said the service would help establish a “candid atmosphere.”

These claims were disputed by an expert in medical ethics, Dr. Bernard Lo of the UC Medical Center in San Francisco.

“The best defense against a lawsuit is a good doctor-patient relationship, and that could be undermined by the appearance that doctors are more concerned about their own liability than helping the patient,” he said in a telephone interview.

“If a patient comes to me after seeing several doctors and is obviously dissatisfied with their care,” Lo said, “it would seem more natural to ask them directly about lawsuits than to go to the back room and make a phone call.”

A company brochure says the service does not provide advice about how to use the screening information but simply “makes it possible to obtain public information at a reasonable cost.”

“Less than 2% of the physicians we surveyed indicated (they) will refuse treatment on the basis of a prior litigation history,” Eckstein said.

Type of Suit Not Given

The service provides the case number, the date and county of filing and the names of plaintiffs and defendants, according to Eckstein. It does not tell the user whether the lawsuit is for medical malpractice, product liability or personal injury, although divorce and child custody cases are excluded.

A physician wanting specific information about the content of a suit or its outcome would have to obtain it from a legal research service or by researching the case directly.

Physicians who join the service can telephone for a name search during business hours. The fee is $10 per name screened. To encourage enrollment by association members, Physician’s Alert said it will waive a $150 annual charge for the service for the first year of operation.

In return for promoting and endorsing Physician’s Alert, the county medical society will receive a percentage of the revenues generated, according to Eckstein. Karlan said the money will be used for public education on the malpractice issue.

A medical association spokesman said the financial arrangement was not unprecedented and that the association has a number of sources of “non-dues revenues,” including insurance programs and ownership of a garage and gas station.

Began in Detroit

The Physician’s Alert service began in Detroit in November, 1983, on a manual basis, with researchers who carried beepers and visited courthouses. Lawyer Paul Huth set up the service after determining that 35% of a sample of malpractice plaintiffs had filed other civil lawsuits.

Physician’s Alert is owned and marketed by Docketsearch Network Inc. of Chicago, whose majority shareholder is I. P. Sharp, a multinational data communications company headquartered in Toronto.

Eckstein predicted that 1,500 to 2,000 area physicians will subscribe to the service, but he refused to provide “sensitive” information about the actual number of subscribers, revenues or the number of daily inquiries that are received. About half of the 20,000 licensed physicians in Los Angeles County belong to the medical association.