Paid Medical Malpractice Claims Decrease, Compensation Up
Paid medical malpractice claims decreased but compensation amounts increased in a new analysis of national claims by specialty from 1992-2014.
The research is the first analysis to evaluate paid claims by physician specialty at the national level. Using data from the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), physicians at Brigham and Women’s Hospital analyzed the trends in paid medical malpractice claims for physicians in the United States from 1992 to 2014. The findings were published in the March 27, 2017, issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. (An abstract is available online at: http://bit.ly/2o9Q3l5.)
The researchers found that the overall rate of claims paid on behalf of all physicians dropped by 55.7%. Pediatricians had the largest decline at 75.8%, and cardiologists had the smallest at 13.5%. After adjusting for inflation, researchers found that the amount of the payment increased by 23.3% and also was dependent on specialty. Neurosurgery had the highest mean payment, and dermatology had the lowest. The percentage of payments exceeding $1 million also increased during the same period.
The report noted that previous research has shown that physicians’ perceptions of their risk of liability can influence their clinical decision-making, and the authors suggested that a better understanding of the causes of variation among specialties in paid malpractice claims may both improve patient safety and reduce liability risk.
Most common among the malpractice allegations was an error in diagnosis (31.8% of all paid claims), followed by errors related to surgery (26.9%), and errors related to medication or treatment (24.5%). Thirty-two percent of paid claims were related to a patient death, with pulmonologists most likely to be involved in a claim that involved a patient death. Plastic surgery and dermatology had the highest percentage of claims that were considered low-severity, with minor physical or emotional injury.
Paid medical malpractice claims decreased but compensation amounts increased in a new analysis of national claims by specialty from 1992-2014.
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