Six Hospitals Announce Interest in Pilot Projects for Special Health Courts

Common Good, the bipartisan legal reform coalition, announced today that six prominent hospitals have expressed “strong interest” in serving as pilot projects for special health courts.

The idea of special health courts, being championed by Common Good, has generated bipartisan support as a way of restoring reliability to medical justice. Both U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and the Progressive Policy Institute, known in the 1990s as President Clinton’s “idea mill,” have endorsed the concept. So have more than 80 leaders in American health care, including patient safety experts and deans of medical schools or schools of public health.

In the U.S. Senate, Michael Enzi (R-WY) and Max Baucus (D-MT) have introduced a bill to authorize and fund pilot health courts. The U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions held hearings on the subject yesterday.

The six hospitals/academic medical centers are:

• Duke University School of Medicine and Health System – Durham, NC
• Emory Healthcare – Atlanta, GA
• Jackson Health System/University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine – Miami, FL
• Johns Hopkins Medicine – Baltimore, MD
• New York-Presbyterian. The University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell. – New York, NY
• Yale-New Haven Hospital/Yale Medical Group – New Haven, CT

“Medical justice today is erratic, infecting healthcare with a debilitating distrust,” said Philip K. Howard, Chair of Common Good. “Special health courts would restore reliability for patients and doctors alike. All Americans should be grateful to these six hospitals for leading the way to better healthcare through their interest in serving as pilot projects.”

Special health courts would be devoted exclusively to addressing health care issues, much as existing specialized courts focus on other areas of law: admiralty courts, tax courts, drug courts, bankruptcy courts, and administrative tribunals in areas ranging from workers’ compensation to vaccine liability.

The hallmark of special health courts would be full-time judges, trained in health care issues. These judges would define and interpret standards of care in malpractice cases, relying on neutral experts paid by the court and setting precedent from one case to another. Special health courts would ensure that patients injured by mistakes would be reliably compensated, without having to pay one third or more to lawyers.

Common Good is currently leading the effort to develop models for special health courts in partnership with The Harvard School of Public Health, with funding from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.