The promise of special health courts for Louisiana.

Louisiana's medical justice system is failing for both providers and patients. Decisions made in the system are too often inaccurate, uninformed, and unpredictable, and the compensation process is slow and inefficient. Moreover, the nature of the current system deters system improvements in patient safety and the quality of care. Comprehensive reform is needed and a new initiative that would create special "health courts" to resolve medical malpractice cases may be the best solution.

Administrative compensation of medical injuries: a hardy perennial blooms again.

Periods in which the costs of personal injury litigation and liability insurance have risen dramatically have often provoked calls for reform of the tort system, and medical malpractice is no exception. One proposal for fundamental reform made during several of these volatile periods has been to relocate personal injury disputes from the tort system to an alternative, administrative forum. In the medical injury realm, a leading incarnation of such proposals in recent years has been the idea of establishing specialized administrative "health courts." Despite considerable stakeholder and policy-maker interest, administrative compensation proposals have tended to struggle for broad political acceptance. In this article, we consider the historical experience of administrative medical injury compensation proposals, particularly in light of comparative examples in the context of workplace injuries, automobile injuries, and vaccine injuries. We conclude by examining conditions that may facilitate or impede progress toward establishing demonstration projects of health courts.