Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Dr. Anupam B. Jena, a Harvard professor and colleague of mine at PHE, has an interesting interview at the Cunningham Group. Dr. Jena discusses his study published in BMJ, which finds that higher resource use by physicians is associated with fewer malpractice claims. In other words, defensive medicine “works” for physicians even if it may…
According to a paper by Jena, Schoemaker, Bhattacharya, and Seabury (2015), the answer is yes. Across specialties, greater average spending by physicians was associated with reduced risk of incurring a malpractice claim. For example, among internists, the probability of experiencing an alleged malpractice incident in the following year ranged from 1.5% (95% confidence interval 1.2%…