Thirty percent of all medical malpractice claims involve a communication failure, according to a new report. These claims involve communication breakdowns in which acts, figures, or findings got lost between the individuals who had that information and those who needed it, across the spectrum of healthcare services and settings.
The report, Malpractice Risks in Communication Failures, from the Boston-based CRICO Strategies, analyzed national medical malpractice claims in general medicine, obstetrics, nursing, and surgery. CRICO Strategies is an arm of CRICO, the medical malpractice insurer. The data came from the CRICO Strategies Comparative Benchmarking System (CBS).
“An important takeaway from this analysis is that when a claim has provider-provider communication failures, it is more likely to result in payment than cases with provider-patient communication issues,” CRICO president Mark E. Reynolds said in a statement accompanying the release of the report. “The data in this report look at specific drivers of those breakdowns which offers organizations actionable intelligence to implement solutions to mitigate those risks.”
The Comparative Benchmarking System database holds more than 320,000 medical malpractice cases from more than 400 hospitals nationwide and provides insight into what goes wrong, and why. Participating organizations contribute their claims to the pool of data, which is then analyzed for insight to specific risk vulnerabilities. Malpractice Risks in Communication Failures is available online at http://tinyurl.com/82xmdaa.
