Residency to Retirement

Physicians in any specialty should realize that mistakes will happen in medicine, and bad outcomes will occur, even when all best practices are followed.

Among the various types of liability that physicians may face, including employee claims, HIPAA violations, cyber liability and slip-and-fall injuries, medical malpractice may be the most impactful.

As advisors to physicians throughout the U. S., we often learn what misconceptions physicians have regarding how to protect their assets from potential lawsuits. In this article, I hope to dispel some incorrect assumptions you may have.

Along with retirement and personal investment accounts, the family home and its equity are often a physician’s most valuable asset.

Of all the risks to doctors, the most common threat to long-term financial security may be divorce. Yet, what can physicians do to protect from this risk?

In past articles, we introduced the concept of asset protection planning — implementing techniques to shield a physician’s personal and practice assets from potential future lawsuits and liability.

Estate planning is an important aspect of wealth management that should be addressed early in a physician’s career and reviewed and modified periodically as he or she ages.

by Sanjeev Bhatia, MD, and David B. Mandell, JD, MB

Many experienced physicians, at one time or another, have worried about being sued for malpractice (or another risk) because of a bad patient outcome or something similar that a colleague of theirs experienced. Millennial physicians would be wise to recognize that all areas of medicine have inherent personal liability risks and take reasonable steps to mitigate and protect against such risks.