Paid malpractice claims among US physicians declined significantly

Between 1992 and 2014, there was a significant decline in paid malpractice claims, possibly due to several factors, including the passage of traditional tort reforms during this period, improvements in patient safety, how institutions and insurers resolve claims and/or the increasing prevalence of communication and resolution programs, according to research published in JAMA Internal Medicine.“In 1986, Congress created the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) to serve as a centralized database of malpractice claims paid on behalf of U.S. physicians,” Adam C. Schaffer, MD, from the division of general medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and colleagues wrote. “Since its inception, the NPDB has contributed to our understanding of national trends in medical malpractice payments and characteristics of risk of liability for physicians. The lack of information on physician specialties, however, has been a major limitation of analyses relying on information in the NPDB.”