Med Mal News

The death certificate may be one of the most important pieces of evidence in a wrongful death case, yet a study published in May in the journal Preventing Chronic Disease indicates that the cause of death may often be misreported on these crucial documents. The article describes the results of two studies that asked more than 500 resident doctors in New York City teaching hospitals whether they believed in the accuracy of death certificates, and whether they themselves had ever misreported a patient's cause of death. Only about a third of them believed that death certificates are accurate overall, and about half of them admitted to having reported the wrong cause of death, often because of external pressure. Most who impugned the accuracy of the documents cited system obstructions, in which their reporting systems would not permit input of true causes of death. Particularly disturbing were the number of respondents who reported being pressed to list an alternate cause of death if the patient died of septic shock (70%) or from acute respiratory distress syndrome (34.2%). Those residents who reported listing an alternate cause of death to the real one generally blamed cardiovascular disease (64.6%) for a patient's death, with the next two false causes identified being pneumonia (19.5%) and cancer (12.4%). The journal article is available at: www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2013/12_0288.htm.