About one in three physicians report they’ve been sued for medical malpractice during their career, a new study from the American Medical Association (AMA) found.
The study analyzed 14,000 responses from AMA Physician Practice Benchmark Surveys between 2016 and 2022. The longer a physician works in the industry, the higher their risk of getting a malpractice claim, according to the study.
Almost half of physicians over the age of 54 have been sued in their career, versus 9.5% of physicians younger than 40 years old, according to the study. Specialty and gender influence the likelihood of being sued: General surgeons and ob-gyns, as well as men physicians, had the highest risk, per the study.
“Even the most highly qualified and competent physicians in the US may face a medical liability claim in their careers, however, getting sued is not indicative of medical errors,” AMA President Jack Resneck Jr. said in a statement. “All medical care comes with risks, yet physicians are willing to perform high-risk procedures that offer hope of relief from debilitating symptoms or life-threatening conditions.”
Sixty-five percent of the claims against physicians from 2016–2018 were dropped, and of the 6% that went to trial, the defendant won almost 90% of the time, according to the study.
Of the medical specialties, ob-gyns and general surgeons had the highest number of liability claims, because the risk of patient harm is high. Almost two-thirds of ob-gyns and 59.3% of general surgeons reported being sued during their career, the study found. Notably, ob-gyns face a heightened risk of lawsuits in states with strict abortion bans. On the other end of the spectrum, only 7.1% of immunologists had a claim filed against them.
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Ob-gyns pay some of the highest annual medical liability insurance costs of the specialties, according to the 2021 Medscape ob-gyn malpractice report. In 2021, a third of ob-gyns reported paying over $30,000 a year in premiums, while more than half of other specialists paid less than $20,000 annually, the Medscape report found.
On average, men physicians had a higher medical liability risk throughout their career compared to women. For every 100 women physicians, there were 42 claims, compared to 75 per 100 men physicians, according to the AMA study.
“There are plausible reasons why some physicians have higher claim frequency than others, such as some specialties being inherently riskier, and more years in practice translating into longer exposure to risk. However, questions remain, such as why women physicians are at lower risk than men, even after controlling for the other observable factors,” study author and AMA senior economist José Guardado wrote in the report.