A new study published in JAMA suggests that doctors with one paid malpractice claim are almost four times more likely than their peers to have additional paid claims in the future, regardless of specialty or whether a state publicly discloses paid claims.
In this retrospective case-control study, law and public health researchers from Georgetown University, the National Opinion Research Center, the University of Colorado, and Northwestern University analyzed paid malpractice claims for all licensed US physicians.
The findings suggest that a single malpractice claim may not be a random stroke of bad luck but instead holds some predictive power into the risk for future paid claims.
“A four times increase in risk is huge, particularly since we observe a similar increase in both high-risk and lower-risk specialties,” David Hyman, JD, MD, professor of health law and policy at Georgetown University Law Center and lead researcher on the study, told Medscape Medical News. “There are surely some false-positives, but there must be lots of actual negligence too, or we would not see these results.”
For the 881,876 physicians analyzed, researchers looked at malpractice claims paid during two 5-year periods: 2009-2013 and 2014-2018. Nearly 96% of physicians had no paid malpractice claims between 2009 and 2013; 3% had one, and less than 1% had multiple claims. The proportion of physicians with paid claims between 2014 and 2018 was similar.
Compared with physicians with no 2009-2013 claims, a physician with just one paid claim in that time period had a 3.7 times higher risk for a future paid claim. Physicians with two paid claims had were nearly seven times more likely to have a future paid claim, and those with three or more paid claims were more than 11 times more likely to have one.
Approximately 3% of physicians with no paid claims between 2009 and 2013 had a future paid claim, growing to 12.4% of those with one paid claim during that time.
Interventions to Reduce Future Claim Risk
The study’s findings may have implications for medical licensing boards and hospitals granting staff privileges.
“After some number of paid claims, there should be an official response” from these entities, such as a hands-on assessment of technical skills or assignment of a peer mentor, said Hyman, who is also co-author of a book titled Medical Malpractice Litigation: How It Works, Why Tort Reform Hasn’t Helped. A graduated set of interventions, whether voluntary or mandatory, can reduce future claim risk and patient harm, Hyman added.
Interventions may include error avoidance and post-error communication training, counseling to improve bedside skills, and encouragement to move into nonclinical practice. Either way, Hyman says a nuanced intervention strategy would be a welcome shift away from the current “all or nothing approach” that too often ends in the revocation of a physician’s medical license.
Although there are strategies to proactively identify physicians with excess risk for malpractice claims and implement preventive measures — like Vanderbilt University’s Patient Advocacy Reporting System, for example — most hospitals and physician groups fail to initiate even informal interventions after a malpractice settlement or verdict, which is missed opportunity, Hyman said.
Steph Weber is a Midwest-based freelance journalist specializing in healthcare and law.
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