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If you’re a physician in a high-risk medical specialty — say, a neurosurgeon– you’ll almost certainly be sued at least once during your career.

That depressing tidbit is from a new analysis of malpractice data from a large professional liability insurer covering nearly 41,000 individual physicians between 1991 through 2005. The study, which was just published in the New England Journal of Medicine, also found a big difference between the odds of being sued and the chances that a suit will actually result in a payment, either via settlement or a jury verdict.

The research, funded by the Rand Institute for Civil Justice and the National Institute on Aging, offers specialty-specific information on the odds of being sued and making a payment, as well as the size of the payment.

Surgeons faced the biggest risk of a claim. For every year of the study period, an average of 19.1% of neurosurgeons, 18.9% of thoracic and cardiovascular surgeons and 15.3% of general surgeons were sued. On the other end of the scale, only 2.6% of psychiatrists, 3.1% of pediatricians and 5.2% of family-medicine doctors were sued each year. Over the course of a career, that means the odds of being sued were 99% for high-risk specialties and 75% for low-risk specialties, the authors calculated.

One other point of interest is the gap between the odds of being sued — on average, 7.4% of doctors had a claim filed against them in a given year — and the odds of making a malpractice payment — 1.6% of doctors did that each year. So only about 20% of claims actually resulted in a settlement or jury award, notes Anupam Jena, lead author of the study and a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Doctors don’t want to be sued at all, though; they’re worried about being part of the 7.4%, not just the 1.6%. “Physicians can insure against indemnity payments through malpractice insurance, but they cannot insure against the indirect costs of litigation, such as time, stress, added work and reputational damage,” the study says. (Read: What’s the Best Offense Against Defensive Medicine?)

The difficult trick is for the system to simultaneously compensate patients who are the victims of real medical errors and to reduce the number of claims that don’t have merit, says Jena.

The average payment was $274,887 though the median was considerably less — $111,749.

Interestingly, the specialties that were most likely to be sued weren’t the ones with the largest payments. Pediatricians were sued less frequently, but when they did face a payment, it was an average of $520,924, more than for neurosurgeons ($344,811). There’s no firm explanation why, but obviously, when there’s a medical mistake that might affect a child for the rest of his or her life, it’s not surprising payments might be high, says Jena.

Pathologists were also low on the list of specialties likely to be sued but faced a relatively high average payment of $383,509.

Only 66 payments recorded during the study period were for more than $1 million, accounting for less than 1% of all payments.

Image: iStockphoto

Read more:
Are You a Surgeon? Sorry, You’re Going to Be Sued By Age 65.