In mid-December of last year, the Ohio General Assembly quietly introduced legislation redefining the definition of medical claim as codified in R.C. 2305.113(E)(3). The change is important because of a growing trend in Ohio, as I mentioned here and here, clarifying that not all claims against nursing homes or hospitals were "medical claims" for the purposes of […]
Last week in Hricik v. Stryker Biotech, LLC, E.D. Penn No. 14-3228, 2015 WL 418118, (Jan. 30, 2015), the trial court remanded a medical device case back to state court after the defendants attempted to assert diversity jurisdiction to have the claims heard in federal court. The defendants, the medical device manufacturer and two individual sales representatives, claimed […]
Last week, in Miller v. State Farm, 2015-Ohio-280, the Ninth District reminded everyone that a motion to compel medical records must be predicated on requests for productions or interrogatories, rather than any other informal request for discovery. The plaintiff, injured in a car accident, sought payment under his underinsured motorist policy with State Farm. During pretrial practice, […]
In Cromer v. Children's Hospital, 2015-Ohio-229, the Ohio Supreme Court recently clarified the duty element in medical malpractice cases, holding that in the context of an established physician-patient relationship, consideration of foreseeability is unnecessary to determining whether the patient is owed a duty of care. Further, a jury instruction on a general rule of law should […]
A panel of the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals reversed a defense verdict in McClellan v. I-Flow Corp, a pain pump case. The case was remanded for a new trial upon the panel's conclusion that the plaintiff's negligence per se claims were not preempted by federal law. The facts were fairly straight forward. The plaintiff had surgery on her […]
