Malpractice payouts on parade
Healthcare consumers using online resources to compare and choose physicians now have the option of basing their decisions on whether a certain doctor has paid a malpractice settlement.
The 15 states that publicly report malpractice typically post such information on state Web sites. Across the states, variations in details – dollar amounts for settlements, particulars of the lawsuits – characterize the data provided.
HealthGrades, a healthcare ratings group whose Web site allows health consumers to purchase reports on 700,000 physicians for comparative purposes, has begun including all malpractice information available on suits that resulted in a payout within the past five years.
The advantage of reporting this information in the HealthGrades physician files – as opposed to state sites – is that the data appears in the context of additional quality information, said Sarah Loughran, HealthGrades executive vice president.
“We look across state lines, because none of the individual states are able to do that,” she said. “We’re not looking at suits or claims. We’re only looking at judgments handed down by the courts.”
Loughran cited a Kaiser Family Foundation survey that found that 70 percent of health consumers consider malpractice information the biggest factor in determining physician choice.
“Based on the interest that’s been shown in surveys, it is something we think consumers are interested in. They want this to help them guide their decisions,” she said.
David Studdert, a professor of law at the University of Melbourne, Australia and author of a Harvard University study on medical malpractice cases, said the survey’s statistic should perhaps discourage reporting on malpractice payouts because it suggests a high likelihood that such information would be overvalued by consumers.
“I think people are much more aware of medical error today, but medical error and malpractice are different things,” he said. “It’s not inappropriate to be concerned about medical error, but one shouldn’t leap from that to thinking that malpractice is the most important indicator of quality.”
Studdert said malpractice is not totally unrelated to quality, but is a weak indicator nonetheless. “Depending on the specialty it may not mean very much at all. If you look at obstetrics, the law of averages says that you’ll have a suit brought against you every two or three years,” he said.
James Rohack, MD, director of the Center for Health Policy at Scott and White, said that in many cases, insurers encourage physicians to settle malpractice claims in order to avoid incurring the costs of defending a suit.
“From the reality standpoint, there is no correlation between a payment and the amount of negligence that has been suffered by a patient when a liability suit is successfully litigated,” he said.
Additionally, whether a physician has a malpractice payout on his or her record is only one small component in the many factors of provider quality, Rohack said. “In the United States, our liability system is so out of whack that it’s almost like, if you haven’t been sued, are you even seeing enough patients?”
