NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Providing more care than necessary may work to lower a doctor’s risk of being accused of malpractice, suggests a new U.S. study.
Although the results can’t prove extra expenditures are due to defensive medicine, the researchers found that doctors in Florida who provided the most costly care between 2000 and 2009 were also least likely to be sued between 2001 and 2010.
“By no means would I consider it to be conclusive, but it does signal to us that defensive medicine could work in lowering malpractice risk, but more research is needed to know if that’s true or not,” lead author Dr. Anupam Jena, of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, told Reuters Health.
He and his colleagues write in an article online Nov. 4 in BMJ that critics of the U.S. malpractice system suggest it encourages defensive medicine.
“If you ask physicians what’s the number one concern they have when you talk to them about their careers, I would say malpractice will come up as one of their top concerns,” Dr. Jena said.
Although it’s commonly accepted that doctors practice defensive medicine, the researchers write, no studies have been able to answer whether the practice actually reduces the risk of lawsuits.
For the new study, Dr. Jena’s team examined data from Florida hospitals, looking specifically at whether doctors within seven medical specialties were less likely to face lawsuits in the year following one when they racked up higher than average hospital charges.
Overall, they had data on nearly 25,000 doctors who oversaw about 18.3 million hospital admissions and faced over 4,300 malpractice claims.
“If you look at doctors who spend more in a given specialty, higher spending physicians get sued less often than low-spending physicians,” Dr. Jena said of the findings.
For example, an internist whose average hospitalization cost about $20,000 (the lowest spending group) faced a 1.2% probability of being sued the following year. That compared to a 0.3% probability of being sued if the internist’s average hospitalization cost about $39,000 (the highest spending group).
Researchers also found a lower probability of facing a lawsuit among obstetricians following a year when they performed a high number of cesarean sections.
Even when looking at individual obstetricians, the researchers found that one’s probability of facing lawsuits changed with the number of c-sections he or she performed. As a doctor performed more c-sections, his or her risk came down.