Increased patient safety has been linked to a decrease in malpractice claims against physicians in California, according to a RAND corporation study.

Researchers studied information from 2001 to 2005 in both medical malpractice claims and adverse events in hospitals with relation to patient safety. The motivation behind this study was to determine whether there was a true relationship between safety outcomes and malpractice claims.

"If the relationship is true, it's suggestive that it might be able to improve the malpractice climate by trying to make patient safety better," says Michael Greenberg, the study's lead author and RAND behavioral scientist.
The researchers found that "within [California] counties, over time, if safety measures get better, the malpractice claims get better," says Greenberg. "And likewise, if adverse events get worse, malpractice claims bounce upward as well."

For this study, scientists analyzed information for approximately 365,000 preventable patient injuries, such as post-surgical problems and hospital-acquired infections, and information for about 27,000 malpractice claims, all of which occurred during 2001-2005, according to the report.

In order to study any correlation between adverse events and malpractice claims, Greenberg and his team of researchers used the Healthcare Cost and Utilization (HCUP) state in-patient database for California - a comprehensive hospital encounter dataset - and to that applied patient safety indicators (PSIs), which were developed to capture 20 specific classes of in-hospital events and complications that carry safety risks.

The researchers gathered data regarding malpractice claims from California's four largest physician medical liability carriers, including Norcal, The Doctors Company, SCPIE and the Cooperative of American Physicians.

They looked at both data sets and found that an increase in adverse hospital events positively correlated with increased malpractice claims for that same year.

Greenberg told DOTmed News that in order to get accurate numbers for filed malpractice claims, he and his team had to look several years back.

"There's often a lag time between the time when an alleged injury takes place and when there's actually a complaint related to it," he says. "So...if you wait two or three years, you can be a lot more sure you're capturing most of the actual claims."

Now that Greenberg and his team have established a foundation for this information, they have plans to move forward and study this relationship over a longer period of time and in more states.

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