Lawsuits for Misdiagnosis – A New Study

By Byron Warnken, on April 25, 2013

I would have thought the most costly medical malpractice cases would involve birth injury cases.  Often, you hear about these cases in the news resulting in enormous jury verdicts.  According to a new study, however, it’s misdiagnosis related lawsuits resulting in the most expense to the medical industry.  The study was done by Johns Hopkins.  We read about it on Fox.

According to the study, diagnostic errors resulted in nearly $40 billion dollars in malpractice payouts from 1986 to 2010.  The study goes on to say that more than one quarter of all malpractice claims were diagnosis error cases.   The most surprising part for me was that one quarter of the claims was more than one-third of all payouts.  In essence, the average misdiagnosis malpractice case has a higher payout than the average malpractice case generally.  That’s surprising, at least to me.  It makes me wonder what cases have a lower than average payout.  I can’t imagine that it’s birth injury.

Though the study did not calculate total number of misdiagnosis cases in a year, the doctors performing the study did estimate the total number of injuries or deaths from misdiagnosis to be somewhere between 80,000 and 160,000 cases each year.  Certainly, some misdiagnosis will be unavoidable.  We’re not all House, MD.  Furthermore, the very nature of diagnosis and the human anatomy is complex.  Therefore, it’s not always malpractice.

To be clear, though performed by Hopkins, the study was not just lawsuits against Johns Hopkins, but was, in fact, a massive study of malpractice cases generally.  In total, the study looked at more than 350,000 medical malpractice payouts.  The information was obtained from the National Practitioner Data Bank.

The medical device industry continues to work on tools for better diagnosis, as does the emergency medical industry.  (Emergency rooms and ambulances produce a great deal of diagnoses in a small period of time.)  I expect the issue to decrease, to some degree, over time.

We do not track lawyers who specialize in misdiagnosis, specifically.  However, we have a list of experienced malpractice lawyers in Maryland.  Most attorneys with good general malpractice experience will have dealt with misdiagnosis cases.

I think it’s naive to think malpractice lawsuits don’t lead to defensive medicine.  My question: is that a bad thing?  There are certainly good points to defensive medicine.  Moreover, lawsuits don’t lead to defensive medicine directly.  You must pass through bad medical facility policies on the way.  What does that mean?  It means a medical facility pays out a few malpractice claims, then stops trusting there doctors at all.