Malpractice Claims and Incident Reporting: Two Faces of the Same Coin?

Giuseppe Vetrugno, Federica Foti, Vincenzo M. Grassi, Fabio De-Giorgio, Andrea Cambieri, Renato Ghisellini, Francesco Clemente, Luca Marchese, Giuseppe Sabatelli, Giuseppe Delogu, Paola Frati and Vittorio Fineschi ()
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Giuseppe Vetrugno: UOS Risk Management Fondazione Policlinico A. Gemelli IRCCS, Department of Health Surveillance and Bioethics, Section of Legal Medicine, School of Medicine, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, L.go F. Vito 1, 00168 Rome, Italy
Federica Foti: UOS Risk Management Fondazione Policlinico A. Gemelli IRCCS, Department of Health Surveillance and Bioethics, Section of Legal Medicine, School of Medicine, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, L.go F. Vito 1, 00168 Rome, Italy
Vincenzo M. Grassi: UOS Risk Management Fondazione Policlinico A. Gemelli IRCCS, Department of Health Surveillance and Bioethics, Section of Legal Medicine, School of Medicine, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, L.go F. Vito 1, 00168 Rome, Italy
Fabio De-Giorgio: UOS Risk Management Fondazione Policlinico A. Gemelli IRCCS, Department of Health Surveillance and Bioethics, Section of Legal Medicine, School of Medicine, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, L.go F. Vito 1, 00168 Rome, Italy
Andrea Cambieri: UOS Risk Management Fondazione Policlinico A. Gemelli IRCCS, Department of Health Surveillance and Bioethics, Section of Legal Medicine, School of Medicine, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, L.go F. Vito 1, 00168 Rome, Italy
Renato Ghisellini: Strategica Risk Consulting Srl, 20123 Milano, Italy
Francesco Clemente: UOS Risk Management Fondazione Policlinico A. Gemelli IRCCS, Department of Health Surveillance and Bioethics, Section of Legal Medicine, School of Medicine, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, L.go F. Vito 1, 00168 Rome, Italy
Luca Marchese: UOS Risk Management Fondazione Policlinico A. Gemelli IRCCS, Department of Health Surveillance and Bioethics, Section of Legal Medicine, School of Medicine, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, L.go F. Vito 1, 00168 Rome, Italy
Giuseppe Sabatelli: Responsabile Centro Regionale Rischio Clinico Regione Lazio, 00145 Rome, Italy
Giuseppe Delogu: Department of Anatomical, Histological, Forensic and Orthopedic Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome, 00128 Rome, Italy
Paola Frati: Department of Anatomical, Histological, Forensic and Orthopedic Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome, 00128 Rome, Italy
Vittorio Fineschi: Department of Anatomical, Histological, Forensic and Orthopedic Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome, 00128 Rome, Italy

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 23, 1-15

Abstract: Incident reporting is an important method to identify risks because learning from the reports is crucial in developing and implementing effective improvements. A medical malpractice claims analysis is an important tool in any case. Both incident reports and claims show cases of damage caused to patients, despite incident reporting comprising near misses, cases where no event occurred and no-harm events. We therefore compare the two worlds to assess whether they are similar or definitively different. From 1 January 2014 to 31 December 2021, the claims database of Policlinico Universitario A. Gemelli IRCCS collected 843 claims. From 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2021, the incident-reporting database collected 1919 events. In order to compare the two, we used IBNR calculation, usually adopted by the insurance industry to determine loss to a company and to evaluate the real number of adverse events that occurred. Indeed, the number of reported adverse events almost overlapped with the total number of events, which is indicative that incurred-but-not-reported events are practically irrelevant. The distribution of damage events reported as claims in the period from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2021 and related to incidents that occurred in the months of the same period, grouped by quarter, was then compared with the distribution of damage events reported as adverse events and sentinel events in the same period, grouped by quarter. The analysis of the claims database showed that the claims trend is slightly decreasing. However, the analysis of the reports database showed that, in the period 2020–2021, the reports trend was increasing. In our study, the comparison of the two, malpractice claims and incident reporting, documented many differences and weak areas of overlap. Nevertheless, this contribution represents the first attempt to compare the two and new studies focusing on single types of adverse events are, therefore, desirable.

Keywords: malpractice claims; incident reporting; risk management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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