Board Certification

During a recent focus group involving hospital credentialing, 18 of 24 jurors said they believe doctors must be board certified to practice medicine.

Based on the frequency of similar responses, we began surveying on the issue last year during groups involving medical malpractice. So far we’ve asked 487 jurors: “Do you think your primary care doctor is board certified?”

Of those polled, 18.9% said “I don’t know” and an astounding 80.3% said “yes.” Perhaps most telling is that only four out of 487 said “no.”

This means that a vast majority of jurors from all regions, backgrounds, ethnicities, genders and incomes assume their doctor is board certified. Our experience tells us this confusion results from an assumption that board certification and medical licensing are one and the same.

Naturally, the question arises: if a doctor involved in a lawsuit is not board certified, how do you discuss the issue? Conversely, if a doctor is board certified, how do you use juror predispositions to your advantage?

Second question first – when doctors are board certified, you need to talk about it. Play to juror predispositions and highlight doctor education, training, experience, as well as the dedication it takes to pass board exams and establish oneself in a specialty. By playing to juror perceptions that doctors should be board certified (whether actually required or not), you establish and bolster their credibility.

Now to the tougher question where there’s no easy answer. When trying a case involving a doctor who is not board certified, you must recognize that jurors are going to perceive it as a net negative. We have tested many ways to address this issue during research, with limited success.

With that said, a lack of board certification makes contextualizing the rest of the doctor’s experience all the more important. We suggest spending considerable time talking about the education they do have, including the number of surgeries or other relevant procedures performed, specific qualifications, fellowships completed, and other credentials. Highlighting that experience can somewhat mitigate the negative biases seen in the above juror statistic.

During the coming year, we’re adding new questions to our Depth Charts to provide you with more quantitative data. If you have any suggestions for juror questions or things you’d like to know specifically, let us know. We’d love to hear them.

-Todd Fairbanks