There are over a million active licensed physicians in the United States, and about 11,000 paid medical malpractice claims each year. You could be excused for thinking, based on those numbers, that nearly one doctor in 100 pays a claim for medical malpractice if claims were evenly distributed. Your math would be right, but your assumptions would be wrong.
That’s because, according to data analyzed by the New England Journal of Medicine, just one percent of physicians account for 32% of paid malpractice claims. That’s nearly a third of all claims paid. In other words, fewer doctors than you might think are paying malpractice claims, but the ones who are are likely to pay more of them.
The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) analyzed data from the National Practitioner Data Bank. They looked at 66,426 claims paid against 54,099 physicians from 2005 through 2014. They found that of the physicians who had paid claims during that period:
Compared with physicians who had one previous paid claim, those who had three paid claims (2160 doctors in total) had three times the risk of incurring another. That translated to an approximately 24% chance of another claim within two years. A doctor’s specialty also had an impact on the risk of additional paid medical malpractice claims.
The data analysis doesn’t explain why 1% of physicians account for ⅓ of malpractice paid claims. Unfortunately for patients, it’s difficult to tell whether a doctor has had one or more paid malpractice claims, and most patients are uncomfortable asking directly. There are some traits that are more common among medical malpractice defendants. They are more likely to be:
Of course, these are still relatively broad categories, and most physicians who meet all of them (say, a 45 year old male surgeon) still have never paid a medical malpractice claim. In other words, demographics alone won’t help you determine whether your doctor has paid one or more medical malpractice claims.
If you are concerned about your physician’s history of malpractice claims, or if you simply want to be armed with information, there are a number of things you can do. The first is to check your state’s medical board website. Most states reference disciplinary actions against doctors, and some include paid malpractice claims. (Even if your state doesn’t report on paid malpractice claims, it’s still worthwhile to see if your doctor has been disciplined.) A few states, such as California, have more detailed physician profile systems that include even more information.
Consumers don’t have access to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), which is the most comprehensive source of information on paid medical malpractice claims. However, hospitals and health systems do, and if a doctor has limited privileges or has had their affiliation with a hospital terminated, that could be a sign that they have had multiple paid malpractice claims or committed some kind of misconduct.
You can also search state court databases to see if there have been any lawsuits involving your doctor. However, not every claim can be found in a court database, because some are settled confidentially before a lawsuit is filed. And even if a lawsuit was filed, that doesn’t mean that it had merit or that it was paid.
The good news is still that the great majority of doctors do not have paid malpractice claims against them, and most of those who do only have one such claim. However, those with multiple claims have an increased risk of incurring future claims. Malpractice claims are not random, and they are not unavoidable events in the medical profession.
Because paid malpractice claims do tend to be concentrated among a small number of physicians, targeted interventions for those doctors could yield important gains in terms of patient safety. Extra monitoring, retraining, or certain limits on practice could prevent the next medical mistake, and the next paid malpractice claim. It’s unclear whether those measures are being taken on any level. If they are not, patients will continue to be at added risk from claim-prone physicians.
If you suspect that your doctor committed medical malpractice that injured you, you should consult with an experienced medical malpractice attorney to determine whether you have a claim. If it emerges that your physician had a history of paid claims, and the hospital or health system did not take measures to protect patients, you may have a claim against them as well. To learn more, contact the Fraser Law Firm to schedule a consultation.
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