by Alison Key, UMN Law Student, MJLST Staff

In May 2013, the Minnesota Supreme Court recognized a new cause of action against healthcare providers for medical malpractice. In Dickhoff ex rel. Dickhoff v. Green, A11-0402, 2013 WL 2363550 (Minn. May 31, 2013), Minnesota joined a growing group of states that permit medical malpractice claims for “loss of chance.”

Under traditional principles of tort law, the elements of a tort include existence of a duty, breach of the duty, causation, and injury, all of which a plaintiff must prove to the standard of “more likely than not.” This standard of proof has posed problems for plaintiffs in medical malpractice suits where the patient had less than a 50% chance of survival before the alleged negligence occurred. If the patient is already “more likely than not” going to suffer the injury of death from a condition before the negligence of a physician, it is impossible to argue that any physician conduct, even if negligent, was the but-for cause of the patient’s ultimate death.

Courts across the country have long grappled with this issue, but have struggled to find a solution. From a patients’ rights perspective, states are uncomfortable with the notion that there is virtual immunity from malpractice liability for physicians who begin treating patients after they are already terminally ill. At the same time, courts have been unwilling to hastily depart from traditional principles of tort causation and standards of proof that require a physician to be the but-for cause of the patient’s injury.

States have confronted this issue in a few ways. One is to adhere to traditional principles of tort causation and not recognize a cause of action for a patient who brings a claim of medical malpractice (generally failure to timely diagnose) after an illness was already “more likely than not” the cause of death. This would not necessarily preclude a patient from bringing an action if she had a greater than 50% chance of survival (whose condition will not “more likely than not” cause death) but due to a physician’s negligence, her chance of survival was reduced to below 50%. In such a case, the physician can be said to have caused by his negligence the injury that is “more likely than not” going to cause the patient’s death. This is the approach Minnesota took before Dickhoff.

Another “solution” is the relaxed causation/substantial factor approach. Similar to the way that tort law deals with concurrent causation, some jurisdictions have held that if the physician’s negligence and the patient’s condition are concurrent causes of death, a jury will determine whether the physician was a “substantial factor” in the injury, and award damages accordingly. This acknowledges, but “relaxes,” the causation requirements in malpractice claims with terminally ill patients, permitting recovery for the whole injury.

A final approach is the doctrine of “loss of chance.” Rather than address the causation problems when a patient is already “more likely than not” going to suffer death, the loss of chance doctrine changes the nature of the compensable injury. Instead of regarding the injury as death, the court acknowledges that any loss of chance of survival is a compensable injury itself for which the physician must be held accountable. Under this doctrine, a patient who sees a physician when her illness is already terminal, let’s say 40% chance of survival, would be permitted to recover if the physician’s negligent failure to timely diagnose her injury reduced her likelihood to 30% before treatment was administered. Under the traditional approach, there would be no way to prove that the physician “more likely than not” caused death, because the illness was always 60% likely to cause death. But under the “loss of chance” doctrine, her 10% loss of opportunity to recover is itself the injury for which the patient can recover. This is the position that the Minnesota Supreme Court took in Dickhoff, permitting patients to recover for a “loss of chance” at life.

While this doctrine has intuitive appeal, it is not without its criticisms. While the Anderson opinion rightly champions patients’ rights, physicians in “loss of chance” jurisdictions raise legitimate concerns. Subjecting physicians to liability under this standard is an imposition that no other professional organization subject to malpractice faces, payment for a loss in the likelihood of success. Such a departure from professional malpractice norms should be seriously considered before imposed. Particularly as physicians are faced with limitless options for testing and treatment, all of which may be reasonable, and for all of which another physician is willing to testify that he would have taken a different course of action. Further, many raise concerns about how loss of chance can be measured, and whether juries will be able to evaluate “likelihood” claims from experts to arrive at reasonable conclusions. There is also the effect of rising healthcare costs that often comes with an increase in liability expenses for healthcare providers.

But the Minnesota Supreme Court assures that these concerns are outweighed by adopting the loss of chance doctrine, which “will advance, not undermine, the fundamental purposes of tort law: deterrence and compensation.” There is an argument that these two justifications will not outweigh the concerns of the medical community. Aside from being offended at the notion that a physician needs a lawsuit as deterrence to responsibly treat a terminally ill patient, the issue with a deterrence justification is that most medical malpractice cases claim negligence in diagnosis. In such cases, the physician is unaware the patient is terminally ill and he has “immunity” to liability. Therefore, physicians argue that the deterrence mechanism is insufficient to warrant such an imposition and uncertainty on health law and the practice of medicine as a whole. Further, the “compensation” rationale does not sit well with many physicians who claim that compensating patients for injury and treatment that was likely to occur anyway will be a windfall for the patient at the expense of the healthcare system (the treatment and outcome for 40% likelihood of success is often the same as the treatment and outcome for 30% likelihood of success). The Dickhoff case was remanded back to the district court for further proceedings after determining that “loss of chance” was a legitimate cause of action. Further cases will show how the patients’ rights issues and the physicians concerns with this system will play out.

For further discussion of the “loss of chance” doctrine, see Tory A. Weigand, Loss of Chance in Medical Malpractice: The Need for Caution, 87 Mass. L. Rev. 3 (2002), reprinted here.