Researchers tracked more than 24,000 Florida physicians over a nine-year period and found that in six specialties, doctors who spent the most health-care resources on hospitalized patients had the lowest likelihood of being sued. It’s the kind of pattern that raises more questions than it answers: The data does not demonstrate that higher spending caused lawsuits to decrease or reveal whether higher spending resulted in fewer medical errors.
“We need to figure out whether it’s the case that spending more by physicians reduces liability,” said Anupam Jena, associate professor of health-care policy at Harvard Medical School, who led the study. “The overall goals in health-care reform are to reduce spending. So that strategy has relied on physicians to reduce spending and overutilization, but by doing so you could imagine their liability risk goes up, and that could be a potential obstacle to getting physicians to buy in to what we’re trying to do as a society with health care.”
