A canary in the coal mine?

How should we think about medical malpractice claims against doctors?  Are they indicative of something about those doctors who've been sued? Are they a symptom of underlying quality and safety issues in a hospital, a kind of canary in the coal mine that suggests there might be deeper problems?  These are long-standing questions.Perhaps part of the answer is provided in a new article in the New England Journal of Medicine, "Prevalence and Characteristics of Physicians Prone to Malpractice Claims," by David Studdert and colleagues.  (The article has a theme that is somewhat consistent to one I discussed a few days ago, which reported that a small group of doctors in Australia accounted for many patient complaints.)The authors conducted an extensive review of US National Practitioner Data Bank information, analyzing 66,426 claims paid against 54,099 physicians from 2005 through 2014. They found that, over this 10-year period, "a small number of physicians with distinctive characteristics accounted for a disproportionately large number of paid malpractice claims."Approximately 1% of all physicians accounted for 32% of paid claims. Among physicians with paid claims, 84% incurred only one during the study period (accounting for 68% of all paid claims), 16% had at least two paid claims (accounting for 32% of the claims), and 4% had at least three paid claims (accounting for 12% of the claims). In adjusted analyses, the risk of recurrence increased with the number of ...
Source: Not running a hospital - Category: Hospital Management Source Type: blogs