In October of 2007 the North Carolina State Legislature allowed the state’s Medical Board to post information about medical malpractice cases on its website. It has taken almost a year for the Medical Board to decide on the specifics of which cases will be posted due to opposition from doctors and insurance companies.
Under the new plans, the medical board now will post malpractice settlements of greater than $25,000 on its Web site. It had previously proposed placing every settlement on its site.
Also scaled back were plans to post the details of settlements going back seven years from the date the malpractice Web site goes live. The site is currently scheduled to launch some time in fall 2009, which would have meant posting settlement data going back to 2002. Instead, the medical board will initially post settlements dating back to October 2007 – the month the medical board won legislative approval to post more information about doctors on its Web site.
The $25,000 limit was decided upon because many consider cases that settle for less than that to be a nuisance case. Doctors will settle some cases that they believe they are not at fault on in order to save on court costs. North Carolina’s Rules Review Commission must now approve the proposal.
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