Dr Moore, who is an honorary research fellow in the Otago law faculty, has received a Harkness Fellowship in healthcare policy and practice, worth about $US119,000 ($NZ158,000), to spend a year in the United States researching alternatives to medical malpractice.
She will travel to the US with her husband, computer scientist Robert Moore, and daughter Rebecca (2).
Dr Moore, who is also a senior lecturer in the Otago department of preventive and social medicine, will start her main research in August and will focus on the ''impact of compensation on the doctor-patient relationship''.
She will collect data in New Zealand and in the United States to investigate factors that ''harm or help the doctor-patient relationship after a medical injury''.
There had been considerable dissatisfaction with New Zealand's ACC law involving ''medical misadventure'', and a sense of unfairness, before reforms were made in 2005.
These changes had switched the focus away from ''misadventure'' to ''treatment injury'' and sought to reduce the blaming of doctors, and to make it easier for patients to gain compensation if they had been injured through having medical treatment.
But Dr Moore said there had since been ''speculation and anecdotal evidence that recent ACC medical injury case law was discouraging doctors'' from helping their patients to make ACC claims.
''This will be the first empirical health law study in New Zealand to investigate that,'' she said.
The results of the study would contribute to health policy and law reform ''both here and in the United States'', she said.
