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Your Practice
CMECNE

So You Want to be an Expert Witness?

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Learning Objectives and CME/Disclosure Information

This activity is intended for healthcare providers delivering care to women and their families.

After completing this activity, the participant should be better able to:

1. List the qualifications to be an expert witness
2. Explain how the role of an expert is to educate a judge and jury about medical standards and outcomes

Estimated time to complete activity: 0.25 hours

Faculty:

Susan J. Gross, MD, FRCSC, FACOG, FACMG
President and CEO, The ObG Project

Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest

Postgraduate Institute for Medicine (PIM) requires faculty, planners, and others in control of educational content to disclose all their financial relationships with ineligible companies. All identified conflicts of interest (COI) are thoroughly vetted and mitigated according to PIM policy. PIM is committed to providing its learners with high quality accredited continuing education activities and related materials that promote improvements or quality in healthcare and not a specific proprietary business interest of an ineligible company.

The PIM planners and others have nothing to disclose. The OBG Project planners and others have nothing to disclose.

Faculty: Susan J. Gross, MD, receives consulting fees from Cradle Genomics, and has financial interest in The ObG Project, Inc.

Planners and Managers: The PIM planners and managers, Trace Hutchison, PharmD, Samantha Mattiucci, PharmD, CHCP, Judi Smelker-Mitchek, MBA, MSN, RN, and Jan Schultz, MSN, RN, CHCP have nothing to disclose.

Method of Participation and Request for Credit

Fees for participating and receiving CME credit for this activity are as posted on The ObG Project website. During the period from Dec 31 2017 through Jan 25 2023, participants must read the learning objectives and faculty disclosures and study the educational activity.

If you wish to receive acknowledgment for completing this activity, please complete the post-test and evaluation. Upon registering and successfully completing the post-test with a score of 100% and the activity evaluation, your certificate will be made available immediately.

For Pharmacists: Upon successfully completing the post-test with a score of 100% and the activity evaluation form, transcript information will be sent to the NABP CPE Monitor Service within 4 weeks.

Joint Accreditation Statement

In support of improving patient care, this activity has been planned and implemented by the Postgraduate Institute for Medicine and The ObG Project. Postgraduate Institute for Medicine is jointly accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), the Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE), and the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC), to provide continuing education for the healthcare team.

Physician Continuing Medical Education

Postgraduate Institute for Medicine designates this enduring material for a maximum of 0.25 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Continuing Nursing Education

The maximum number of hours awarded for this Continuing Nursing Education activity is 0.2 contact hours.

Read Disclaimer & Fine Print

To win a medical malpractice lawsuit, a patient must typically prove three basic elements

  1. The existence of a healthcare provider-patient relationship
  2. The doctor’s negligence in providing treatment
  3. That the patient was in fact harmed by that negligence

The heart of almost every medical malpractice case centers on whether the healthcare provider’s actions or lack of action injured the patient.

To prove negligence, it is usually necessary to retain an expert medical witness who has experience with the kind of procedure or health condition in question. The role of the expert is to educate the judge and jury about the standard of care. The expert does not necessarily have to be from the local community.

To qualify as an expert witness, the person must generally meet the following qualifications:

  1. Experience and knowledge in the relevant areas of clinical medicine to be able to testify about the applicable standards of care at the time of the occurrence. Being clinically active in the specialty is critical. Clinical activity means examining patients, operating, teaching, or consulting.
  2. Provide fair and impartial testimony about all the medical facts to ensure a just verdict is reached
  3. The physician’s testimony must reflect an evaluation of performance in light of generally accepted standards, neither condemning performance that falls within generally accepted practice standards nor endorsing or condoning performance that falls below these standards. Experts and their testimony should recognize that medical decisions often must be made in the absence of diagnostic and prognostic certainty.
  4. Distinguish clearly between medical malpractice and medical maloccurrence. In other words, state the difference between substandard care leading to a bad outcome as opposed to providing appropriate care but still having a bad outcome.
  5. Determine whether a deviation from a practice standard was related to the bad outcome.
  6. Be prepared to have prior testimony subjected to peer review.

Learn More – Primary Sources:

ACOG Committee Opinion 374: Expert Testimony

Affidavits of Merit

Expert Witnesses

Take a post-test and get CME credits

TAKE THE POST TEST

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Related ObG Topics:

You’ve Been Served! Part One
Practice management info for your women's healthcare practice
You’ve Been Served! Part Two: Next Steps After Getting Court Papers
You’ve Been Served! Part Three: Intro to the Deposition

Legal Disclaimer Click To Expand

This website (the “Website”) is a service made available by The ObG Project LLC, its partners, affiliates or subsidiaries (“Provider”). This Website provides general information related to the law and is designed to help users safely cope with their own legal needs. This website does not provide legal advice and Provider is not a law firm. None of our customer service representatives are lawyers and they also do not provide legal advice. Although we go to great lengths to make sure our information is accurate and useful, we recommend you consult a lawyer if you want legal advice. No attorney-client or confidential relationship exists or will be formed between you and Provider or any of our representatives.
This website is not intended to be a source for legal advice, and thus the reader should not rely on any information provided in this website as such. Readers should not consider the information provided to be an invitation for an attorney-client relationship, and should always seek the advice of competent counsel in the reader’s home jurisdiction. Provider may provide links to third party websites. These links are provided only as a convenience. Linked websites are not reviewed, controlled or examined by Provider and Provider is not responsible for the information, advertising, products, resources or other materials, of any linked site or any link contained in a linked site. The inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement by Provider. In addition, please be aware that your use of any linked site is subject to the terms and conditions applicable to that site. Please direct any questions regarding linked sites to the webmaster of that site.

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Computer System Requirements

OBG Project CME requires a modern web browser (Internet Explorer 10+, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge). Certain educational activities may require additional software to view multimedia, presentation, or printable versions of their content. These activities will be marked as such and will provide links to the required software. That software may be: Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime, Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft PowerPoint, Windows Media Player, or Real Networks Real One Player.

Disclosure of Unlabeled Use

This educational activity may contain discussion of published and/or investigational uses of agents that are not indicated by the FDA. The planners of this activity do not recommend the use of any agent outside of the labeled indications.

The opinions expressed in the educational activity are those of the faculty and do not necessarily represent the views of the planners. Please refer to the official prescribing information for each product for discussion of approved indications, contraindications, and warnings.

Disclaimer

Participants have an implied responsibility to use the newly acquired information to enhance patient outcomes and their own professional development. The information
presented in this activity is not meant to serve as a guideline for patient management. Any procedures, medications, or other courses of diagnosis or treatment discussed or suggested in this activity should not be used by clinicians without evaluation of their patient’s conditions and possible contraindications and/or dangers in use, review of any applicable manufacturer’s product information, and comparison with recommendations of other authorities.

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