West Des Moines, Iowa, January 4, 2008: Cambridge Economics Group today announced a new service for attorneys and their clients who are involved in medical malpractice cases. The service, MedMal ExpressTM, is provided through the company's Internet site, www.medmalreports.com. Users can sign up for a 2-week free trial, after which the service is $95 per month.
"The innovation of MedMal ExpressTM is that it lets users see expected settlements in up to 20 cases or case scenarios in real time," said Dr. David M. Frankel, Founder and Chief Economist of CEG. "Our predictions are tailored to the lawsuit's location as well as other key case parameters."
"MedMal ExpressTM is intended for attorneys and clients on both sides of a lawsuit," Dr. Frankel added. The company suggests the following potential uses for its new service:
•Advising insurance companies how much money to reserve in a case.
•Evaluating potential case strategies. For instance:
- adding or dropping a defendant;
- choosing which accusations to stress.
•Testing different case scenarios. For example:
- If the case against one or more defendants is dismissed;
- If the plaintiff's medical outcome changes.
MedMal ExpressTM uses CEG's proprietary predictive model, which is derived from patterns of payments in the National Practitioners Data Bank, a repository of essentially all malpractice payments made in the U.S. The model considers the following key features of a case:
•The trial location (U.S. state)
•The age, gender, and medical outcome of the patient
•The number of defendants
•The defendants' ages and job descriptions
•The accusations made against each defendant
"But our model goes one step further," Dr. Frankel stated. "It also considers important interactions between these features. For instance, some states have caps on pain and suffering that reduce payments for certain outcomes (such as purely emotional injuries) more than others. This means that the effect of medical outcome on payments depends on the state. By taking account of this and other important interactions, we can generate very realistic predictions of the expected settlement in a case."
Note to Journalists
Journalists and other opinion leaders who wish to try MedMal Express without entering credit card information are asked to set up a user account on the site, medmalreports.com, and then to send their user name to CEG using the General Inquiry button on the medmalreports.com home page. A MedMal Express trial subscription will be set up for you.
About Cambridge Economics Group
Cambridge Economics Group was founded in 2004 to provide economic and statistical analysis in complex litigation settings, including antitrust, intellectual property, regulation, and personal injury. Its offices are located in West Des Moines, Iowa.
Dr. David M. Frankel is a tenured economics professor at Iowa State University and has been a visiting professor at Cornell and Stanford. His research has appeared in leading economics journals such as Econometrica and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Dr. Frankel received his Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T. in 1993. He has an M.S. in Sociology from Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and an A.B. in Mathematics from Harvard (Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude). Prior to joining the faculty at Iowa State, Dr. Frankel taught for eight years at Tel Aviv University in Israel.
http://www.medmalreports.com
