Having read this I honestly was left wondering whether malpractice should exist as a concept at all. Clearly several people screwed up with bad consequences here. But it seems like this isn't something the courts can fix.
For one, isn't it true that many (most?) doctors in the USA have malpractice insurance? Any lawsuit win against them doesn't make much personal financial difference, just increases medical costs for everyone else as the payment to the 'victim' (not the actual direct victim in this case) is just socialised and dispersed. Moreover the fact that insurance is sold at all suggests that malpractice claims are seen as being in some sense random and unavoidable risk events, not something that can actually be avoided by just being sensible.
For another, presumably the underlying logic of malpractice suits is to punish the underlying error in order to incentivise ... something ... that would prevent a recurrence. Is there any plausible, actionable outcome here which would prevent this type of repeated human error in future? One that that isn't counterbalanced by costs that would yield worse outcomes in other cases? If so, why are we so sure the courts are best placed to locate and enforce this vs the medical profession itself, which I believe already aims to save as many lives as possible?
In the software industry there are no malpractice suits. I can't believe it would benefit anything if there were: imagine if people could directly take devops staff at major web services to court anytime there was an outage because they made a thinko in a config file? Would this magically eliminate outages because everyone is now being super careful? Certainly not. People are already well incentivised to avoid mistakes. You'd just get malpractice insurance in the software industry too, and those costs would be passed on to employers in one form or another, so all that'd occur is random payouts to random people who happened to sweet-talk the court into perceiving "malpractice" vs ordinary mistakes and a whole lot of time spent on lawyers. I can't believe it'd actually impact software reliability in any meaningful way, and if it somehow did it'd probably only be by eliminating business models that were striking a reasonable risk/stability balance already (e.g. Twitter and Facebook in the early days prioritised moving fast and breaking things over absolute stability despite millions of people using their services).