Paid medical malpractice claims: How strongly does the past predict the future?

Kowsar Yousefi, Bernard Black and David A. Hyman

Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 2023, vol. 20, issue 4, 818-851

Abstract: When does the past predict the future? In financial markets, warnings that “past results are no guarantee of future performance” are ubiquitous. But in multiple fields (including professional sports, insurance, and criminal law), it is widely believed that the past is a useful guide to the future. Does that insight apply to medical malpractice (“med mal”)? Using a novel dataset (which includes detailed data on all licensed physicians and all paid claims in Illinois over a 25‐year period), we study whether past paid med mal claims, physician characteristics, and specialty predict future paid med mal claims. After controlling for other factors, physicians with a single prior paid claim have a fourfold higher risk of future claims than physicians with zero prior paid claims. The more prior paid claims a physician has, the higher the likelihood of a future paid claim. Multiple factors (male gender, having an MD, attending a non‐U.S. medical school, practicing in a high‐claim‐risk specialty, and mid‐career status [6–15 prior years of experience]) predict a higher likelihood of having one or more paid med mal claims.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12371

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:empleg:v:20:y:2023:i:4:p:818-851

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Empirical Legal Studies from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().