Common Good and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to Expand Initiative to Promote Health Courts
Common Good, the national nonpartisan legal reform coalition Alan Simpson is a member of, has been awarded a two-year grant of nearly $1 million from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to promote the creation of special health courts to handle medical injury disputes in six states. Common Good (http://www.cgood.org) is a nonpartisan legal reform coalition dedicated to restoring common sense to America. Its advisory board is composed of leaders in a wide range of fields including former government officials. The new project builds on a previous RWJF-funded project by Common Good and the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) to design a prototype for special health courts. Common Good encourages health courts to restore reliability to medical justice. While many thousands of patients suffer preventable medical injuries each year, only a small fraction of them are compensated for their losses. Administrative costs in today's system are extremely high, and patients in similar circumstances often receive vastly different judicial outcomes. Health care experts often cite the current legal system as a major impediment to improving quality of care, since it effectively discourages physicians and hospitals from being candid about errors in treatment.
