As an expert witness, I’m Dr. Noah Kaufman with Kaufman Medical Group, and today I want to dive into a critical concept for all expert witnesses and attorneys: the standard of care. While often perceived as a simple right-or-wrong determination in medicine, it’s far more nuanced.

Standard of care is fundamentally about reasonable care. It requires a prospective view, without the benefit of knowing the outcome of a case. It asks: What would a reasonably trained physician, with similar experience and training, do in that exact same situation with a patient?

To help clarify this, I use what I call the “100-Doctor Rule.” Imagine 100 doctors, all reasonable and similarly qualified, placed in the exact scenario as the provider in question in your medical-legal matter. How many of them would have provided care in the exact same way?

• If the answer is that 100 out of 100 doctors would have done something completely different, then you likely have a black-and-white standard of care problem. This indicates a clear departure from accepted practice.
• However, if 50 out of those 100 physicians might have taken a different approach, recognizing that there are multiple valid ways to manage a situation, then you’re in a “gray zone.” This signifies a more complex issue where various reasonable approaches exist.