“Doctors get sued far more frequently than anyone would have thought, and in some specialties, it’s extremely high,’’ said Amitabh Chandra, an economist and professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and an author of the study. “In some sense, the payment is the least important part, because you can insure against it, but you can’t insure against the hassle cost.’’
The study looked at claims data for nearly 41,000 physicians from 1991 to 2005. The researchers found that 7.4 percent of physicians had a malpractice claim against them each year and that 1.6 percent had a claim that led to a payment each year.
The likelihood and outcome of lawsuits varied considerably across specialties. But the fact that even doctors in low-risk areas of practice, such as family medicine, had a 75 percent chance of being sued during their career is cause for concern, Chandra said.
Every time doctors are sued they face lost income from the time they spend out of the office fighting the case, said Dr. Alan Woodward, a retired emergency physician who is chairman of the Massachusetts Medical Society’s committee on professional liability. The threat to their reputation is a cause of major stress, and the anxiety can compromise the care they provide to other patients, he said.
Fear of lawsuits drives many physicians to practice defensive medicine - ordering more diagnostic tests than necessary, for example - or to retire early, Woodward said. And when doctors fear legal retribution, they are less likely to share information, with patients or internally.
“It creates a culture of secrecy and fear,’’ he said.
The small number of successful malpractice cases does not mean most are frivolous, said Chandra. It can be difficult to prove that an injury resulted from an avoidable error in patient care, he said.
“Many of us are coming to the conclusion that litigation is not the answer,’’ Chandra said.
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