Date and Time
April 28, 2004
1:45 PM - 3:15 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

This seminar features two panelists from the Stanford Law School discussing "Two Research Projects at the Intersection of Law and Medicine." The event will be moderated by Hank Greeley, a Stanford law professor and CHP/PCOR associate, who is active with the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. In the first presentation, Susanne Tagder will discuss "Regulating Through Information: Regulatory Approaches to Reporting of Medical Adverse Events." (see description below) Medical error reporting has been on the regulatory agenda for more than a decade. Various federal and state databanks collect information on medical mistakes, malpractice payments and licensure actions against physicians. Recently, advocates of disclosure regulation have demanded open access to physician databanks in hopes that, through information disclosure and public pressure, physicians will improve their quality of care. This presentation will address the question of whether this expectation is justified. If we want to build safety into the healthcare system, how should regulation be designed to best meet this goal? Should regulators rely on information disclosure, quality management, or market forces? After discussing the main barriers to medical error reporting, the speaker will argue in favor of a management-based quality surveillance system instead of mandated public disclosure of medical mistakes. Susanne Tagder is currently a judge in Karlsruhe, Germany, and a JSM candidate at Stanford Law School (Stanford Program in International Legal Studies). She earned her law degree from Heidelberg University and holds an LLM degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1998, she was appointed to the Sozialgericht, a social law court specializing in healthcare law, pensions, disability law, and public health issues. In the second presentation, Yael Bregman-Eschet will discuss "Access to Antiretroviral Drugs in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Legal and Health Policy Perspectives." (see description below) Since the outbreak of the AIDS pandemic more than two decades ago, the disease has taken the lives of more than 25 million people worldwide. It is estimated that there are about 40 million people living with HIV/AIDS in the world today. Approximately 26.6 million of them, almost 70 percent, are from sub-Saharan Africa. Although existing drugs that are commonly available in the Western world can prolong the lives of AIDS-afflicted patients and can substantially improve their quality of life, in 2003 only 100,000 adults living with HIV/AIDS in Africa, or 2 percent of all AIDS patients on the continent, received antiretroviral treatment. This fact raises the need to investigate the major factors preventing access to antiretroviral treatment in sub-Saharan Africa. This talk will explore the key barriers to treatment, as recognized by both legal and medical scholarship, with a special emphasis on the TRIPS agreement and patent rights. The talk will further evaluate what should be the role of patent rights in future attempts to increase the availability of treatment in sub-Saharan Africa. Yael Bregman is an Israeli attorney, currently pursuing her JSM degree as a fellow of the Stanford Program in International Legal Studies at Stanford Law School. She holds a law degree from the University of Haifa, Israel, where she specialized in intellectual property law. Yael practiced law at Israel's leading law firm in the domain of intellectual property and technology, and is a co-author of a working paper on the legal ramifications of the September 11 attacks.