HCA Houston Healthcare Hospital Malpractice Lawyer

Trial-Ready Hospital Negligence Attorneys for HCA Houston Healthcare Patients and Families

The Types of HCA Houston Healthcare Lawsuits Our Hospital Malpractice Attorneys Handle

Hastings Law Firm handles HCA Houston Healthcare malpractice lawsuits for patients and families in Houston, Texas. A claim can run against the campus that gave the care, the physicians and groups who practice there, and the staff involved. Our attorneys handle claims over emergency care errors, heart, bariatric and orthopedic surgery errors, and labor, delivery and newborn intensive care injuries.

The cases we see most often across a community hospital network like HCA Houston Healthcare include:

• Emergency room and 24/7 emergency location errors. A serious condition can be missed at triage, misread on imaging, or left untreated while it worsens. That can happen at a main emergency department or at one of the system’s HCA Houston ER 24/7 locations. The window in which that condition was still treatable closes, and what follows can be permanent harm or the loss of a family member. Our Houston failure to diagnose lawyers work back through the triage record, the imaging and the orders that came after it.
• Heart, bariatric and orthopedic surgery errors. The system’s own pages point to heart surgery and bariatric surgery at its Medical Center campus, and Texas Orthopedic Hospital belongs to the same family of hospitals. A mistake during an operation of that kind, or a complication nobody catches afterward, can cost a patient an organ, the use of a joint or the ability to work. Our Houston surgical error lawyers compare the operative note against the anesthesia record and the charting from the days that followed.
• Labor, delivery and newborn intensive care injuries. Several campuses hold state maternal and neonatal designations and run newborn intensive care units. Warning signs during labor can go unanswered, a delivery that needed to happen quickly can be put off, and a newborn under intensive care can be watched too loosely. Mothers and babies live with those results for years, and some of the harm is permanent. Our Houston birth injury lawyers trace what the monitoring recorded, what the delivery team wrote down, and how quickly the newborn’s care began.

While these are the more common claim types, our hospital malpractice attorneys handle any valid medical negligence case that arises at one of these hospitals.

About HCA Houston Healthcare and Its Houston-Area Hospitals

HCA Houston Healthcare is a private for-profit hospital system in the Houston area and part of HCA Healthcare, a publicly traded company based in Nashville, Tennessee. HCA Houston Healthcare is not a government facility. Alongside its hospitals, the system runs emergency locations across greater Houston.

Those emergency locations carry the HCA Houston ER 24/7 name. Spring, for example, is a department of HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest rather than a hospital of its own. The hospital a location belongs to is the hospital a claim for that care runs against.

Four campuses, Clear Lake, Conroe, Kingwood and Northwest, hold the state’s Level II trauma designation, and other campuses hold Level III or Level IV. Several also carry the state’s maternal levels of care designations. Level III newborn intensive care runs at Clear Lake, Kingwood, Northwest and Southeast. Two affiliated specialty hospitals sit inside the system as well, Texas Orthopedic Hospital and The Woman’s Hospital of Texas, which holds a Level IV newborn intensive care unit.

Residency and fellowship programs run at several campuses. Clear Lake hosts residency and fellowship programs, Kingwood does as well, and Northwest hosts fellowships. Where residents and fellows take part in a patient’s care, the supervising physicians and the group behind them are identified from the records.

HCA Houston Healthcare is a network rather than one building, so a claim can come from a suburban campus as readily as from one in the city. Its Houston-area hospitals include:

• HCA Houston Healthcare Clear Lake (Webster)
• HCA Houston Healthcare Conroe
• HCA Houston Healthcare Kingwood
• HCA Houston Healthcare Medical Center (Houston)
• HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest (Houston)
• HCA Houston Healthcare Pearland
• HCA Houston Healthcare Southeast (Pasadena)
• HCA Houston Healthcare Tomball
• HCA Houston Healthcare West (Houston)
• HCA Houston Mainland (Texas City), a campus of Clear Lake
• HCA Houston North Cypress (Cypress), a campus of Kingwood
• Texas Orthopedic Hospital (Houston)
• The Woman’s Hospital of Texas (Houston)

Can You File a Lawsuit Against an HCA Houston Healthcare Hospital, the Doctor, or Both?

You may be able to file a lawsuit against the HCA Houston Healthcare hospital that treated you, against an individual provider, or against both, depending on who was responsible. A hospital answers for the negligence of the people it employs, including the nurses and technicians who deliver care hour by hour.

It answers separately for the choices it makes as an institution, from how a unit is staffed to the safety systems meant to catch a problem early. How the campus that treated you is staffed shapes the rest of the answer.

At the campuses that host training programs, residents and fellows take part in patient care under supervising physicians. A failure in that supervision can rest with the hospital or with the supervising group rather than with the trainee at the bedside. The second question is who employs the specialists.

The physicians treating patients at an HCA Houston Healthcare hospital are not all employed on the same terms. HCA’s own website terms of use note that some physicians credentialed at its hospitals are employed by the hospital’s parent company, and others are not. Who employed a provider does not decide whether a claim exists, only who is named as a defendant and how the claim is built. Whether you need a lawyer to sue a hospital, a physician group, or both, every health care provider and facility that took part in the care is identified first.

Texas adds a requirement of its own before a claim can move forward. Chapter 74 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code calls for a written report from a qualified medical expert early in the case. Our Houston hospital malpractice lawyers cover vicarious liability, corporate negligence, the contractor defense and how that report requirement works. Our firm also represents patients injured at other Houston hospitals, including HCA Houston Healthcare Northwest and Ben Taub Hospital.

Does It Matter Which HCA Houston Healthcare Hospital Treated You When You File a Malpractice Claim in Texas?

The HCA Houston Healthcare hospital that treated you matters, because a Texas health care liability claim is brought against the health care institution and the providers responsible for the care. Chapter 74 of the Texas Civil Practice and Remedies Code counts both a hospital and a hospital system as an institution. The right defendants are identified from the records of the campus that treated you.

That includes a location run as a campus of another hospital, as Mainland is under Clear Lake and North Cypress under Kingwood.

Written notice of the claim goes to each physician and health care provider it is brought against, at least 60 days before suit is filed. A medical authorization form goes with that notice, and the notice tolls the filing deadline for 75 days. Where a patient’s care crossed two campuses, the notice has to reach every provider and institution the claim is against, which is one more reason the records come first.

An expert report has to be served on each defendant within 120 days of the date that defendant files its original answer. A claim reaching two campuses or several providers needs the report to address each of them on its own terms. How many defendants a claim names therefore shapes how much expert work it takes at the very start.

Texas limits noneconomic damages separately for each health care institution found liable, with an overall limit when more than one is. Economic losses are not limited in the same way. A claim that spans two campuses can reach two institutions, so which institutions are named affects what the claim can recover. Our guide to suing a hospital for medical malpractice in Texas explains who can be named and how those claims are built.

How We Work With Injured HCA Houston Healthcare Patients

Hastings Law Firm represents HCA Houston Healthcare patients and families in hospital malpractice claims in Houston, Texas, whichever campus or emergency location gave the care. A first call reaches a member of our intake team, and someone in the family can make it when the patient is in no condition to call.

Tell us which hospital or emergency location treated you, when, and what you were told about it afterward. Our team works to make sure you are heard, and your account is the starting point for everything that follows.

The review itself runs on the complete medical records, which our team requests so you do not have to chase them. Our attorneys and medical professionals read the emergency department charting, the operative notes, the monitoring data and the medication orders from every location involved. Records from two campuses have to be read as one course of care, because that is how the patient lived it. When we take a case, it rests on that record and on the physicians who can stand behind it in front of a jury.

From the day we are retained, every approach from the hospital, its insurer and its lawyers goes through us. Our board-certified patient advocates stay in contact through the case and explain what each development means when there is one to report. Our hospital malpractice attorneys pursue a settlement measured against everything the injury has cost. When an offer falls below that, we are prepared to try the case.

If You or a Loved One Were Injured at HCA Houston Healthcare, Speak With Our Medical Attorneys Today

Hastings Law Firm handles hospital malpractice claims in Houston, Texas, for families left worse off by care at an HCA Houston Healthcare hospital or one of its emergency locations. Our hospital negligence lawyers will go through what happened and tell you which hospital and which providers may be responsible for it. When we believe a bad outcome was not malpractice, you will hear that from us plainly.

Our team is here for you. We perform a free case review to find out whether you have a valid claim, and what you tell us stays confidential. You pay no fees or costs unless we win. Let us help you find the answers you deserve.