Physicians With 1 Paid Malpractice Claim Are 4 Times More Likely To Pay Future Claims: A study entitled “Association of Past and Future Paid Medical Malpractice Claims” published on February 10, 2023 in JAMA Health Forum found: “Physicians with even a single paid medical malpractice claim in a prior period were shown to have a greatly elevated risk of having additional paid claims during a future period. With 5-year prior and future periods, a single paid claim in the prior period was associated with a roughly 4 times higher likelihood of a future-period paid claim, relative to the likelihood for physicians with no prior-period claims.”
“The elevation of risk was similar for both high-risk and lower-risk specialties. The greater the number of prior-period paid claims, the greater the likelihood of having a paid claim over any given future period, as well as the expected number of future-period claims. This pattern was not affected by whether plaintiffs’ lawyers had access to information about physicians’ past paid claims.”
“The increased future-period risk, relative to the risk physicians would face if claims were random events, was much higher for physicians who had multiple paid claims in both the prior and future periods. For the 1214 physicians with 3 or more prior-period claims, 83 had 2 future-period claims, and 92 had 3 or more future-period claims. Yet if claims arrived at random, there should be no physicians in either group (the simulated number was less than 0.1 for 2 future-period claims, and less than 0.02 for 3 or more future-period claims).”
The study’s investigators conducted a retrospective, case-control study including all 881,876 physicians licensed to practice in the United States at the time of the study (between July, 2018 and January, 2023). “Paid claims are an imperfect signal of low-quality care. Still, we offer evidence that even 1 claim provides an important signal, and that multiple claims provide a strong signal. This signal can likely be strengthened by combining information on paid claims with data on unpaid medical malpractice claims, specialty, and disciplinary sanctions imposed by state medical boards, loss of hospital privileges, and other adverse events … Some paid claims are false-positive claims, but taken as a whole, paid claims convey a strong signal of future risk. The policy challenge is how to use this information to reduce future medical malpractice claims and patient harm without overreacting to the signal conveyed by a single paid claim.”
“The findings of this study suggest that paid medical malpractice claims are not random events; timely noncoercive intervention has the potential to reduce future claims.”
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