Healthcare in America is in crisis. The causes of this crisis are many and varied, but distrust of the system of justice is at the forefront. This distrust causes wasteful defensive practices and loss of honest interaction essential to quality care. Providing a solid foundation of reliable justice would alleviate these effects and may be essential to the effectiveness of other reforms.

A quorum of experts and leaders in healthcare will convene on Tuesday, October 29, 2002 for a discussion of how to improve healthcare with a new system of medical justice. A plenary session will set the agenda with, among other speakers:

· Mark McClellan, FDA Commissioner-designate

· Philip Howard, chairman and founder of Common Good

Participants will break out into four groups, each to discuss one of the following issues:

1) What decision-making body can best achieve reliability and trust?

2) What compensation scheme(s) can best balance fairness and the broader social interest?

3)  How can reliable credentialing and other non-compensatory accountability best be accomplished?

4) What legal mechanisms best achieve desirable transparencies?

The breakout groups will be led by two or three experts each, including the following:

· Alain Enthoven, Professor of Public and Private Management, Stanford Graduate School of Business

· Robert Hahn, Director, AEI-Brookings Joint Center 

· Charles Hammond, MD, President, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists

· Dan Kessler, Associate Professor of Economics, Law and Policy, Stanford Graduate School of Business

· Robert Litan, Co-Director, AEI-Brookings Joint Center

· Michelle Mello, Assistant Professor of Health Policy & Law, Department of Health Policy & Management, Harvard School of Public Health

· Jeffrey O’Connell, Professor of Law, University of Virginia Law School

· David Studdert, Assistant Professor of Law & Public Health, Harvard University

· William Roper, MD, MPH, Dean, School of Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Each participant will receive in advance a briefing book summarizing effects of our legal system on the quality and availability of healthcare.