Medical Malpractice Attorneys in Kalamazoo, Michigan 

Your health is the most valuable asset you have, and it is impossible to put a price tag on it.  Many people suffer a serious injury or illness at some point in their lives, sadly it’s not always preventable. This is when we look to healthcare professionals to provide treatment for those injuries and illnesses. 

Medical treatment should not, however, make your health worse in the long term. Physicians, nurses, and other medical professionals have a legal duty to act as a reasonable healthcare provider would under similar circumstances and take reasonable measures to cure the patient’s injury or illness. They are expected to prevent serious complications from medical procedures. When providers make medical errors, or otherwise fail to act reasonably, and it harms patients physically and financially, this is what we call medical malpractice.  

It’s important to contact the top medical malpractice attorneys in Michigan, who have extensive experience with these types of cases. The Kalamazoo personal injury attorneys at Hoffer & Sheremet, PLC, can help if you’ve suffered a serious illness or injury as the result of preventable medical negligence. Read on to learn more about medical malpractice in Michigan, from your expert Kalamazoo personal injury lawyers. 

What is Medical Malpractice? 

Personal injury law, including medical malpractice law, is based on the idea that certain professional relationships impose a duty of care. This means that those professionals have a legal responsibility to not cause injury to others, and not to place others at high risk of injury. This is known as the standard of care, which means there is a certain level of care a patient can expect from a provider. This ‘standard’ is based on the accepted medical practices. 

In medicine, physicians have a legal duty to follow the standard of care. This means they must choose a reasonable course of action to treat the patient under the circumstances. This could include choosing the correct diagnostic testing, ordering the right medication, or performing surgery in a safe manner. 

A bad outcome does not always mean that the standard of care was violated. Unfortunately, not all death is preventable, nor every illness curable. However, we use expert witnesses that have the same qualifications as the defendant-healthcare provider to explain how the treatment is supposed to be done and whether the defendant did it correctly or not. This helps us better understand and can help prove your case to a potential jury.  

The standard of care can, and does, change over time. Medical research is always evolving, and opinions change about the best way to perform certain treatments, or about the most appropriate treatments for certain diseases. While this can be tricky to navigate, your Michigan medical malpractice attorneys can help you determine if any standards of care were violated. 

Common Types of Medical Errors 

Your Kalamazoo personal injury attorneys have put together a list of common types of medical errors that they see daily in their casework. If you believe a provider committed medical negligence, reach out to Hoffer & Sheremet, we’re here to listen. These are some common errors: 

• Wrong diagnosis or late diagnosis – A provider fails to correctly diagnose a patient’s disease until it is too late; the illness, injury or disease advances and is harder, or impossible, to treat. A correct diagnosis would have been possible if the providers had performed the appropriate tests, or if they had been more attentive to the patient’s symptoms. This may sometimes lead to an untimely, tragic death. If you believe a loved one passed due to medical malpractice, contact your Kalamazoo wrongful death attorneys today. There are statues of limitations to filing Michigan medical malpractice cases. 

• Preventable adverse reactions – Providers did not take a sufficiently thorough medical history and administered a medication that the patient should not have been given because of a pre-existing medical condition. These reactions are preventable and are not in compliance with the standard of care. Providers must get a full medical history from patients and their families.  

• Birth injury – Medical negligence before, during, or immediately after childbirth cause the child to suffer a lifelong disability. We have extensive experience with birth injury lawsuits and are the top medical malpractice lawyers in Michigan, please contact us if your family has experienced this kind of medical negligence. 

• Medication dosing errors – Patients receive the wrong dose of medication because of an error made by the provider in ordering the medication, the pharmacy in filling the prescription, or by the person who is administering it. 

• Surgical errors – Surgeons negligently cause any injury that is not a recognized risk of surgery, operate on the wrong body part, post-operative fails to rule out life threatening conditions, such as sepsis. If you believe your surgeon committed a medical error, medical negligence lawyers in Michigan are here to help you! Contact us today. 

• Anesthesia error - Anesthesiologists make errors in dosing or in failing to monitor the patient’s vital signs that cause the patient to suffer a stroke or die. 

• Emergency room errors – Emergency medicine physicians or nurses fail to properly triage patients, fail to order appropriate tests, fail to recognize and timely treat stroke or heart attack, or fail to order consults. This medical negligence cannot go unnoticed, just due to lack of staffing. If you or a loved one was injured by medical malpractice, it’s imperative you get the help you need from personal injury attorneys in Kalamazoo, Michigan. 

• Pediatric malpractice – Pediatricians, or other specialists treating children, fail to timely diagnose and treat a life-threatening condition. 

• Radiology errors – Radiologists fail to properly interpret imaging studies such as x-rays, CT scans, MRI, or ultrasound. This means trained providers are reading scans incorrectly. This kind of medical negligence can be life-threatening if not caught in a timely manner. If you were the victim of medical malpractice in Michigan, contact your Kalamazoo personal injury lawyers today. 

There are many types of medical negligence; not all medical malpractice cases fall into the above categories. In fact, if you suffered a serious personal injury or illness, you may have grounds for a malpractice case, if that injury or illness was directly caused by a medical error. 

What Compensation Can You Get From a Medical Malpractice Case? 

You can be compensated for damages caused by your injury through a medical malpractice lawsuit. For medical malpractice in Michigan, we’ve seen an array of settlements ranging from $25,000 to upwards of $1 million. It can be hard to determine the worth of an individual’s case, as every claim is different. However, there are two main categories of financial compensation: “economic damages” and “non-economic damages.” Your personal injury attorneys in Kalamazoo, Michigan can help you determine the worth of your case, with a combined 30+ years of experience, we know the law the medicine, so we can help you best understand your case. 

Economic damages can include medical expenses, money spent on medical equipment, wages loss for time missed from work, and household assistance. This type of damage would also include the loss of ability to earn money, money spent to make accommodations to your home, mileage to healthcare appointments. You can recover money for past medical expenses as well, but this money must be repaid to your health insurance company, this is called the “medical lien.” 

The non-economic damages are usually what people are most familiar with, which includes the “pain and suffering” that occurred from the medical negligence. This includes compensation for stress, anxiety, depression, damage to relationships, or loss of companionship for a loved one that died, or scarring and physical disfigurement. Michigan only allows patients to recover a certain amount of money for non-economic damages. This is known as the “non-economic damages cap.” The maximum cap amounts change each year. For cases that settle or go to trial in 2024, the “low cap” is $569,000 and the “high cap” is $1.016 million. To be eligible for the high cap, the patient must have suffered from one of the following: 

• They are hemiplegic, paraplegic, or quadriplegic and have experienced total functioning loss of at least one limb due to brain or spinal cord injuries. 

• They have permanently impaired cognitive capacity rendering them incapable of making responsible decisions and performing activities for normal living. 

• They have suffered permanent loss or damage to a reproductive organ, resulting in the inability to procreate. 

Our Kalamazoo personal injury attorneys can give you an estimate of the maximum amount you can receive at trial and how much you can expect to receive if your case settles. This is from their years of experience in the field of medical negligence. At Hoffer & Sheremet, you get the whole team at our law firm in Kalamazoo, MI working to support your case. 

How Medical Malpractice Lawsuits Work 

Before a medical malpractice case can be filed, we first must assess if you have a case. We do this by gathering your medical records and sending them to an expert for review. As mentioned earlier, it’s required that Michigan medical malpractice cases retain expert witnesses within the original providers same field or specialty. If that expert agrees the original healthcare provider committed medical negligence, and that the negligence caused, or worsened, the patient’s injury or illness, we will then proceed to the next step. 

Michigan law requires us to issue what’s called a “Notice of Intent to Sue.” This is a letter that we send to everyone that we may include in the lawsuit. Then, we need to wait 182-days to actually file the lawsuit by filing and serving a Complaint. The 182-day waiting period is very unfair to patients, but it is the law. This waiting period is meant to encourage parties to settle outside of court. However, this rarely happens, and, in the meantime, plaintiffs could continue to suffer more economic or non-economic damages. 

When we’re finally able to file the lawsuit, we include a document called an “Affidavit of Merit.” This is our expert’s written opinion that a breach of the standard of care caused your injury or illness. 

The defendants will answer the Complaint. Then both sides exchange written questions and ask each other for documents pertaining to the case. This is called written discovery and can continue throughout most of the lawsuit. After the initial discovery is exchanged, we begin depositions. A deposition is basically a series of question/answer sessions, between an attorney and the witnesses. These are testimony under oath, and it happens before a court reporter, but it takes place away from the courtroom. 

Throughout the lawsuit, each side is filing motions. This is when either side can ask the judge to make legal rulings. Sometimes, the losing side can appeal the judge’s decisions, which can add years onto the medical malpractice lawsuit. 

Settlement discussions can happen any time, but usually, formal settlement discussions take place after discovery and motions. Oftentimes, the parties hire a mediator. The mediator goes between the parties exchanging settlement numbers. If a settlement is reached, the case is over. 

If the parties cannot agree on a settlement amount, the case goes to trial. You can read in more detail about the progression of medical malpractice cases in our article Med Mal 101. 

Contact a Michigan Medical Malpractice Lawyer 

A Kalamazoo personal injury attorney can help if you’ve suffered a serious injury caused by a medical provider’s negligence. Contact Hoffer & Sheremet, two experienced medical negligence lawyers in Michigan. Our intake form is a completely free case review, fill it out here and a member of our team will contact you within 48 business hours. 

It helps to have a timeline written down to reference when we first get in touch with you. The top medical malpractice lawyers in Michigan are here to listen. If we think you have a viable medical malpractice case, we will help you gather your medical records and proceed with an investigation. Tell us what happened, we’re here to listen.