Paid physician malpractice claims for adverse events in 2009 (from Bishop, Ryan & Casalino in this week’s JAMA):
| Inpatient | 4910 |
| Outpatient | 4448 |
| Both | 966 |
| Total | 10,739 |
By way of comparison (my calculations):
| Incidence | ||
| Number of US hospitals | 5,795 | <1 per hospital/year |
| Number of admissions | 37,479,709 | 0.00014/admission |
| Number of US physicians | 661,400 | 0.01624/physician/year |
| Medical error deaths(preventable, IOM) | 44,000 | 4.1 deaths/paid claim |
| 98,000 | 9.1 deaths/paid claim |
4.1 to 9.1 deaths per paid claim has strong implications for medical apology laws (now proposed in MA). Studdert, Mello, Gawande, Brennan and Wang (health policy All-Stars) raised this question in Health Affairs back in 2007. The key assumption is to what extent apologies will prompt litigation from patients who don’t sue today.
updated: typos
