Professional negligence by a health care provider has implications for both the health and legal professions: Preventable medical injuries increase the overall cost of treatment, while malpractice lawsuits have been blamed for further increasing the cost of health care in the United States. RAND researchers have examined medical malpractice legislation and its effects on stakeholders such as the health care consumer, the medical practitioner, and the legal community.
Journal Article
The average physician spends nearly 11 percent of an assumed forty-year career with an unresolved, open malpractice claim. The long time it takes for a case is resolved is distressing for both doctor and patient.
Journal Article
In this survey of six state mental health telephone consultation program directors, we report the annual number of children referred for consultation and the number of lawsuits against consultant clinicians.
Blog
Computerized clinical decision support (CDS) systems have been developed to enhance physician decisionmaking and reduce the incidence of avoidable medical errors. Drug-drug interaction warnings are a mainstay of CDS systems, but they give rise to a fundamental problem that limits the utility of the systems to date.
Journal Article
The authors assessed the appropriateness of recommendations for hysterectomies done for nonemergency and nononcologic indications for 497 California women. Seventy percent of the hysterectomies were judged to have been recommended inappropriately.
Journal Article
New electronic clinical decision support (CDS) systems are intended to reduce medical errors but sometimes have the unexpected and perverse effect of overwhelming physicians with potential warnings about trivial events, particularly regarding drug-drug interactions.
Journal Article
The risk of medical malpractice varies substantially according to physician specialty.
Research Brief
The most comprehensive analysis of the risk of malpractice claims by physician specialty in more than two decades finds that U.S. physicians have a greater than 75% career-long risk of facing litigation. In some specialties, doctors can be virtually certain of a lawsuit over the course of their careers. However, the vast majority of those claims will not result in payment to a plaintiff.
Journal Article
The likelihood of malpractice suits and the size of indemnity payments vary across specialties, but by age 65, 75% of physicians in low-risk specialties had faced a malpractice claim, as compared with 99% of physicians in high-risk specialties.
Commentary
From the standpoint of policy makers, the basic challenge is to ensure that liability concerns do not derail the clinical value of new CDS technology, write Michael Greenberg and M. Susan Ridgely.
Journal Article
Clinical decision support (CDS) refers to electronic technology used to enhance clinical decision making. The basic challenge for policymakers interested in promoting adoption of CDS is to ensure that liability concerns do not derail the clinical value of new CDS technology.
News Release
Reducing the number of preventable patient injuries in California hospitals from 2001 to 2005 was associated with a corresponding drop in malpractice claims against physicians.
Research Brief
Investigates the relationship between safety outcomes in hospitals and malpractice claiming against providers, using data for California hospitals and insurers from 2001 through 2005.
Report
Investigates the relationship between safety outcomes in hospitals and malpractice claiming against providers, using administrative data and measures for California hospitals and insurers from 2001 to 2005.
Report
This document explores how changing medical liability laws to reduce the frequency and severity of claims would affect health system performance along nine dimensions.
Research Brief
RAND Europe reviewed the problem of patient harm in Europe, assessed expected effects of three policy action areas to improve safety and modelled the potential health benefits that could be achieved by reducing numbers of harmful events.
Journal Article
The authors use variation in the generosity of local juries to identify the causal impact of malpractice liability on medical costs, mortality, and social welfare.
Journal Article
Analyzes effects of noneconomic damages caps and attorney fee limits on the ability of people injured by negligent physicians to retain qualified lawyers to represent them
Research Brief
This fact sheet describes a study that found that policies targeting physicians' medical malpractice payment histories as a way to deter medical malpractice are ineffective, mainly because paying physicians are not the negligent ones.
Journal Article
Some states use physicians' histories of medical malpractice payments to try to reduce the incidence of medical malpractice (and for other reasons).
Journal Article
Easily gathered physician characteristics can be helpful in designing targeted quality of care improvement policies.
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