Doctors who provide costly care are less likely to be sued: study

Doctors who are bigger spenders in terms of providing more healthcare are less likely to face a lawsuit from their patients due to malpractice, based on a recent study published in the BMJ.

The US study have found that doctors in Florida who provided the most costly care between 2000 and 2009 were also least likely to be sued between 2001 and 2010. The research, though, cannot say whether the extra expenditures from these doctors were measures taken with defensive medicine as the sole consideration.

"If you look at doctors who spend more in a given specialty, higher spending physicians get sued less often than low spending physicians," said lead author Dr. Anupam Jena from the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

"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."

Just like any other research studies, there is a limitation to the study. The researchers, in this case, did not have much information on how severe the patients' illnesses were. The study also cannot say for sure whether higher spending is, in fact, a result of practicing defensive medicine, according to a report from Reuters.

Jena said that, in simple terms, the findings of the study showed that higher spending by physicians is associated with lower claims, but anything more than that they cannot tell. This was seconded by Dr. Daniel Waxman of RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. He added that the only thing you can be sure about is that there is a correlation between spending and a risk of being named as a defendant on a lawsuit, but he also emphasized that it's a correlation without causation.

"Yes, doctors are afraid of lawsuits, but they're also afraid of looking bad," said Waxman, who has researched defensive medicine but was not involved in the new study. "There are other motivations to do more as well."

The researchers looked into the data of more than 24,000 physicians with around 154,000 physician years, and have been part of over 18.3 million cases of hospital admissions. From this number of medical professionals, 4342 malpractice claims were made against them (2.8 percent per physician year).

The findings also showed that those obstetricians who performed a high number of cesarean sections had a lower probability of getting sued within the following year, which may be due to defensive medicine effect.