Ohio Accident Attorneys

Local company in business of crashing

PLAIN CITY, Ohio - A central Ohio company announced the opening of its new laboratory with a crash yesterday.

SEA Limited's ceremonies yesterday included the demonstration of its rollover-crash simulator. As employees and local dignitaries watched, a golf-cartlike vehicle accelerated on a metal sled and then came to a sudden stop, flipping onto its side. A crash-test dummy felt the brunt of the force.

"What we're really looking at is how the dummy moves inside the vehicle," said Gary Heydinger, a design engineer. The dummy has 24 sensors, and the crash was being photographed by a high-speed camera.

The demonstration provided a glimpse of the work of a Columbus-based company well-known in its field but largely unknown in its hometown.

"This is our coming-out party," said Glenn Baker, the CEO and co-founder.

SEA, short for Scientific Expert Analysis, does product testing and investigation for companies trying to verify the safety of their goods and for lawyers in product-liability cases.

Founded in 1970, the company now has 215 employees in 10 offices nationwide, with about 100 in central Ohio. Customers include retailers, automakers, law firms and the government.

One of the observers yesterday was E. Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University. He was there because of the company's strong ties with the school. Both of the co-founders and more than 40 employees are OSU alumni, and several employees are also part-time faculty members at OSU.

"Our folks are the yeast that makes everything rise," Gee said.

Until recently, the company kept a low profile because most of its work was bound by confidentiality agreements with clients, Baker said. Now, a larger share of the work can be disclosed.

The headquarters is on the Far North Side. The Plain City location is a new research center, opened in an 18,000-square-foot building the company previously used for storage.

The rollover-crash simulator will provide a new tool for people who are testing products or who want to re-create an accident, said Joe Gerling, a Columbus lawyer who has contracted with the company in product-liability cases.

"I haven't seen anything quite like this," he said.

SEA provides impartial research. Sometimes the results are the opposite of what the client would like to see.

That's a good thing, Gerling said, because the client will know if the product needs to be improved or if the court case should be settled.

Malpractice Occurs at Same Rate in Hospitals and Doctors' Offices ...

Hospitals increasingly have checklists and protocols to ensure that they follow best practices and avoid errors and acts of medical malpractice .

More doctors' offices should have similar safeguards in place.

That is the conclusion of a team of medical researchers from the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York that has just finished a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In findings they call "unexpected," the team calculated that medical errors occur at about the same rate in both hospitals and doctors' offices. Those results came from examination of the National Practitioner Data Bank over a several-year period, a database that contains information relating to malpractice claim payments.

"We were actually very surprised by that finding," says Tara Bishop, the study's lead researcher, noting that many more surgeries and complex treatments occur in the hospital setting.

But that is changing and accounts for why a near equal number of adverse outcomes result in private offices and clinics. Bishop cites the "invasive and high-technology diagnostic and therapeutic procedures that are increasingly being performed in the outpatient setting."

And the errors are often far from insubstantial, with death and severe injuries being the most common reason for bringing a legal claim.

Although the number of adverse events is roughly similar, the types of errors that most commonly occur are different in doctors' offices and hospitals, respectively. In the former, misdiagnosis is a predominant problem, whereas surgical errors are more prevalent in hospitals.

That means that different types of efforts are required to lower the incidents of malpractice. Hospitals need to tightly adhere to those checklists, while doctors in private settings need to communicate better with their patients.

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