A report from the consumer group Public Citizen suggests that medical malpractice errors are a major problem in healthcare industry, and while no doctor will argue that the current system is perfect, the American Medical Association suggests the group’s simplistic statistical analysis doesn’t tell the full story.
The Public Citizen report notes that while medical malpractice payments are trending downward, they claim there is no evidence that medical malpractice errors are occurring at a lower rate. Instead, they say physician demand for payment caps are the reason total payouts are down.
“An essential first step would be for the AMA and other leaders to commit the same level of energy to eradicating avoidable adverse events in hospitals as they have in pursuit of the laws to limit doctors’ liability for those adverse events,” the report included.
AMA Hits Back
Not surprisingly, the American Medical Association did not take the “recommendations” lightly. An AMA spokesperson said the report was generated using “inherently flawed” data from the National Practitioner Data Bank.
“The Government Accountability Office has determined that the NPDB is riddled with duplicate entries, inaccurate data and incomplete and inappropriate information,” the spokesperson noted.
The AMA spokesperson also said Public Citizen neglected to exclude the 65 percent of medical liability claims that were “dropped, withdrawn or dismissed.” Defending dropped or dismissed claims accounted for 38 percent of the total defense costs, the AMA spokesperson noted citing data from the Physician Insurers Association of America.
“Less than 10 percent of the medical liability claims were decided by a trial verdict, and the vast majority of them – 89 percent – were won by the physician defendant in the case,” the spokesperson concluded.
As to the notion that the AMA is focused more on defending lawsuits than preventing them in the first place, Douglas Merrill, MD, of Dartmouth College, said that’s simply not true. In fact, he claims the relatively constant number of medical errors may be due to more reports coming from the physician’s end.
“As an industry, healthcare has been striving for over a decade to create a climate of self-disclosure in the certainty that this would help discover trends in risk and safety that can be addressed at a systems level and preventive changes made earlier,” said Merrill. “Thus, a greater number of errors reported is potentially good news.”
Merril ended by saying that relying on insurance data to assert that the healthcare industry is failing to do their part in preventing malpractice errors is a poor assessment.
“No credible caregiver would say that healthcare can’t be improved, whether regarding access or quality, or error rates. However, no credible healthcare analyst would use insurance data as an accurate descriptor of the need for or the intensity of those efforts.”
Dr. Silverman comments
As I’ve said before, statistics don’t lie, statisticians do. The organizations that complain about a drop in malpractice payments are consistent about one thing, they only measure the data that helps their cause.
The AMA’s response is right on.
Related source: Medscape
