Doctors seek to head off lawsuits

When Maggie Heath visited her cardiologist recently, she was asked to sign an arbitration agreement. Heath, a paralegal, read it, then refused. An office manager told her if she didn't sign, after 30 days she'd no longer be considered that physician's patient.

It's a situation more patients are encountering when they seek medical help, even from physicians who have treated them for years.

Arbitration agreements are nothing new. But they are becoming the medical community's response to what they say is a too-litigious society. And the Utah Legislature last session passed a law that says physicians can refuse to treat anyone who refuses to sign an arbitration agreement, which says you'll settle disputes in arbitration, not the court system.

Its popularity is not limited to health care, either. If you carry a credit card, have cable television, financed a car, bought a house or title insurance, even had pest control done, for example, you may have agreed to arbitration, whether you read the small print or not.

Heath rejected the agreement because she believes "as it was written, it gives away all of my rights as well as my spouse's rights for redress should something dire happen to me as a result of a doctor's negligence," she said. "I balked. . . . I told them this was a violation of my right to due process and that further I had no right to sign away my spouse's rights."

The medical profession, and indeed others, see it differently.

Doctors say medical malpractice premiums are rising at a rate they can't afford. And they've had "some indication that with widespread adoption (of arbitration), there will be a positive effect on premiums," said Mark Fotheringham, spokesman for the Utah Medical Association, which is trying to teach members the proper way to incorporate such agreements into their practices. If the cost of defending against malpractice claims drops, they expect their premiums to drop, too.

Besides that, Fotheringham said, arbitration is less expensive for both patient and physician, and it's settled much faster than a case wending through the courts.

A medical test

Intermountain Health Care recently launched a pilot study of arbitration in its Sandy clinic. All patients, through October, will be asked to sign an arbitration agreement, said Harlan Hammond, assistant vice president for risk management services. "Then we will sit down and discuss what we learned from it. We want to see how patients respond when asked to sign an agreement and learn from the questions they ask, the concerns they raise, reassess the form prepared for the purpose and our informational services."