The Duty to Warn – When Can a Physician Breach Patient Confidentiality to Protect a Third party?

This is the fifth article of our series discussing practical and evidentiary issues in medical malpractice. Each article will examine recent medical malpractice case law and focus on the practical and evidentiary issues within them. The goal is to provide some useful insight into the obstacles that occurred in hopes that future cases can adapt and develop new ways to overcome these challenges. In this article, Andrea Donaldson discusses when the interest in public safety overrides physician-patient confidentiality and examines how the “duty to warn” has been approached by the courts over the years.