Imagine going to the doctor with a problem — and being told everything is fine.
Then months later, you find out it wasn't fine at all.
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Medical Malpractice Statistics: What the Data Actually Shows
The numbers reveal that medical malpractice claims are less common than many people assume, but when they do occur, they often involve serious injuries, high financial payouts, and complex legal challenges. Most claims arise from preventable medical errors such as misdiagnosis, surgical mistakes, medication errors, and delayed treatment.
While not every poor medical outcome is malpractice, data helps separate perception from reality. A closer look at medical malpractice statistics shows clear patterns in how often these cases are filed, what types of errors are most common, and how they typically resolve. These numbers also highlight how difficult it can be for patients to pursue successful claims, even when negligence is involved.
Daniel A. Waxman, MD, PhD
Department of Emergency Medicine
David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California, Los Angeles
RAND Corporation Santa Monica, California
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: When people talk about medical error, they are usually referring to treatment error—giving the wrong medication, operating on the wrong side of the body, etc. But many believe that diagnostic error—the failure to diagnose a condition when a patient seeks care—is at least as widespread and consequential a problem. However, diagnostic errors are intrinsically difficult to measure, since one can rarely prove that a condition was present at the time it was not diagnosed.
In this study, we introduce a novel method for measuring how often patients who come to the emergency room with symptoms of an imminent cardiovascular emergency such as acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) are discharged home without a diagnosis.
We find that among Medicare patients whose ER visits were attributable to symptoms of an imminent infarction, only about 2.3% were discharged home, and that the figure was under 5% for each of the other four conditions we studied. However, we also found that these relatively low rates did not improve between 2007 and 2014.