A study published in the BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) reports that doctors in Florida who provided the most costly care between 2000 and 2009 were the least likely to be sued. The team at the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at the University of Southern California and at Stanford University examined the correlation between high hospital charges for patients and the number of lawsuits filed in the following year.
Lead author Dr. Anupam Jena told Reuters Health:
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…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.
Anupam B. Jena, M.D., Ph.D. is an associate professor of health care policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School and an assistant physician in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he practices general inpatient medicine and teaches medical residents.
The study analyzed data on almost 25K doctors who oversaw over 18M hospital admissions. Commenting on the finding, Dr. Jena said, “If you look at doctors who spend more in a given specialty, higher spending physicians get sued less often than low-spending physicians.”
In U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective: Spending, Use of Services, Prices, and Health in 13 Countries, the Commonwealth Fund writes:
The U.S. stood out as a top consumer of sophisticated diagnostic imaging technology. Americans had the highest per capita rates of MRI, computed tomography (CT), and positron emission tomography (PET) exams among the countries where data were available. The U.S. and Japan were among the countries with the highest number of these imaging machines.
