If you’re a doctor or a healthcare professional, you’ll be well aware of the risks associated with your profession. Since your job involves caring for or treating patients, you’re already exposed to specific liabilities, including a medical malpractice claim. Unfortunately, dealing with this legal challenge can significantly affect your medical practice. It can hurt your professional reputation and your means of income. Because of this, you should know how to protect your practice from this problem.
Below are the four tips to legally protect your medical practice:
Get The Right Types Of Cover
From day one of practicing your medical profession, you may be liable for committing medical malpractice and other liability issues. These things can wipe out your medical career before you have a chance to get off the ground. With this in mind, it’s crucial to buy suitable types of insurance. Having these insurance policies can help you protect your profession legally.
The following are some types of protection you may want to consider for your medical practice:
- Malpractice Insurance: This is one of the essential types of insurance you should obtain as a doctor or a medical professional. Also known as professional liability insurance, malpractice insurance allows you to protect your practice if you’re being sued for negligence by your patient. It can help you cover the expensive legal defenses and settlements costs. Also, you need to know is that this type of insurance doesn’t only apply to licensed professionals. It also protects medical students who spend hours of hands-on clinical experience.
- Workers’ Compensation Insurance: If you practice medicine independently and hire some employees, you need this type of insurance to cover any expenses if one of them gets seriously injured. A workers’ compensation insurance provides medical and wages replacement benefits to an injured or sick employee during employment.
- Disability Insurance: If you’re unable to practice your profession because of an illness or an injury, you may want to consider purchasing disability insurance. It can help fund certain expenses, such as salaries, taxes, utility bills, and other costs if you’re out of the office temporarily.
Always Seek For Informed Consent
As a doctor or other medical practitioner, it’s crucial to obtain informed consent to safeguard your medical practice. For example, if you’re operating on a patient, you need to get their consent or their guardian before pushing through with the procedure. Your failure to do so can expose you to a potential medical malpractice lawsuit.
For this reason, you should explain the elements of a specific procedure, including the risks, costs, side effects, and other similar situations, before it takes place. Ensure you have good communication skills to ensure your patient or guardian understands what you’re talking about to avoid miscommunication. Also, when getting informed consent, it’s best to do it in writing. Typically, written consent can be used as evidence to protect yourself if a patient files a malpractice case against you.
Ensure Proper Documentation
Aside from informed consent, you also need to keep complete records and documents when practicing your medical practice. In most cases, proper documentation is essential in maintaining a doctor-patient relationship. You can legally safeguard yourself and your profession against getting sued for medical malpractice when you have the proper documents.
For example, you should write all essential details, including the date, time, and the parties involved. When providing a diagnosis or administering a treatment plan, make sure to record all the findings, instructions, prescriptions, and other medical decisions you’ve made for your patients. Also, although it seems unnecessary, make sure to write eligibly as much as possible.
By complying with these documentation requirements, you can minimize your risk of facing a lawsuit and possibly losing your career in the medical industry in the long run.
Stay Updated On Certain Medical Laws
Specific medical laws also govern your medical practice as a healthcare professional. You need to follow the rules and regulations to make sure you can practice your profession without getting into legal trouble. Hence, it’s essential to stay up-to-date on current medical laws in your state to ensure legal protection against lawsuits and other liabilities.
For example, medical doctors and other practitioners should uphold confidentiality with their patients. This confidentiality as an area of law has been reinforced and supported with the introduction of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or HIPAA. Under this law, you need to safeguard the confidentiality and privacy of a patient’s medical records. Failing to do can result in hefty fines and other penalties.
Because of this, it’s crucial to be aware of certain medical laws. By doing so, you can avoid violating any rules and regulations, making you susceptible to lawsuits and other legal problems.
Bottom Line
Facing legal trouble can cause a significant financial loss and a damaged reputation. Therefore, if you don’t want your years of medical study to be put to waste, keep the information mentioned above in mind. That way, you can protect your medical practice legally and ensure a thriving career in the healthcare industry for a long time.