Serious Misdiagnosis-related Harms in Malpractice Claims: the “Big Three” — Vascular Events, Infections, and Cancers

Researchers analyzed data from CRICO Strategies Comparative Benchmarking System (CBS)—a database of more than 400,000 malpractice claims drawn from more than 400 academic and community medical centers, estimated to contain 30% of all malpractice claims in the United States. The study examined approximately 55,000 malpractice claims from CBS to determine how many were attributable to diagnostic error. The research was funded by the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine (SIDM) through a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

The research confirms that inaccurate or delayed diagnosis remains the most common, most catastrophic and most costly of medical errors. The analysis provides additional context for a 2015 National Academy of Medicine report that highlighted that diagnostic errors result in up to 80,000 deaths annually in U.S. hospitals.

Citation for the Full-text Article

Newman-Toker DE, Schaffer AC, Yu-Moe CW, Nassery N, Tehrani ASS, Clemens GD, Wang Z, Ganai M, Siegal D. Serious misdiagnosis-related harms in malpractice claims: The “Big Three”–vascular events, infections, and cancers. Diagnosis. July 2019. (Published online July 11, 2019). https://doi.org/10.1515/dx-2019-0019

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