If you had chest pains, would you go to a jury of your peers for a diagnosis? Would you ask your banker whether you need angioplasty, or your car dealer how long you should stay in the hospital? Of course not.

You’d go to a specialist for that advice. For the same reason, juries drawn from the general population, as wonderful as they are in most cases, lack the expertise to determine whether your doctor diagnosed and treated you properly.

Juries are expected to listen to weeks of conflicting medical testimony and arrive at the truth. They often fail. How often? Up to 80% of the time, according to the Harvard Medical Practice Study, which examined 67,000 court records and patient files from 53 hospitals across the state. Similar studies in Utah and Colorado also show that the vast majority of verdicts against defendants are unjustified by evidence from the patient’s file.

The current system is unfair to physicians, conflicts with our society’s commitment to justice, and cheats the actual victims of medical negligence of a fairer and faster remedy.

What is that remedy? Specialized medical courts. Specialty courts are nothing new. We’ve got tax courts, patent courts, family courts, traffic courts, and many more.

In medical courts, the right to a jury trial, which is guaranteed by our state constitution, would be preserved. The difference is that all the medical malpractice cases would be assigned to the same few judges.

They would hear similar cases again and again, recognize the same patterns of fact, and become expert at keeping junk science and irrelevant scientific theories out of the courtroom. They could also be given additional training in scientific and statistical evidence, and call neutral expert witnesses to help the jurors understand which of the hired guns brought in by the parties is actually telling the truth.

Does this sound radical? It is, compared with the usual reform proposed: caps on pain and suffering (noneconomic damages).

Caps merely limit the size of the damage award. They don’t get to the heart of the problem, an unjustified verdict. Why cap the injustice when you can eliminate it? Imagine any other area of the law with an 80% rate of unjustified verdicts. If most verdicts in criminal cases were unsupported by the evidence, no one would be calling for caps on jail time. The decision-making process has to be fixed by providing trained, experienced medical malpractice judges.

The best news is that this remedy can be achieved administratively, without having to push legal reform through the New York State Legislature. That’s important, because many elected politicians seem to have taken a Hippocratic Oath of their own: First, do no harm to the trial lawyers. Administratively created courts are already doing good work for the people of New York. There are more than 170 specialized courts across the state, all created by the Office of Court Administration. For example, five of these courts hear only commercial disputes, offering parties the opportunity to have a judge experienced and familiar with commercial matters guide the proceedings.

According to the Business Council of New York State, these commercial courts are “the envy of businesses in other states.” Several specialized domestic violence courts help families deal with this difficult issue in one court, rather than being shuffled between family court and criminal court.

Judges can’t hear real estate cases one day and medical malpractice cases the next day and still do an expert job of vetting scientific evidence and guiding the jury. Experience is required, just as it is when you have chest pains and need a doctor.

Experienced medical court judges and neutral expert witnesses would help juries understand the technical medical issues presented in the trial and reach a verdict that is fair to doctors and injured patients alike. A fair trial – who can argue with that?

Ms. McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York State, a health policy expert at the Hudson Institute, and chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths at www.hospitalinfection.org.