The report provides the most detailed look yet at the impact of apology legislation on such claims.
The researchers are Larry Van Horn, associate professor of management, law and health policy, and executive director of health affairs at the Owen School; W. Kip Viscusi, University Distinguished Professor of Law, Economics and Management; and Benjamin McMichael, PhD’15, JD’15, assistant professor of law at the University of Alabama. Their paper, “‘Sorry’ Is Never Enough,” appears in the Stanford Law Review.
Reducing malpractice litigation has become a target of policymakers seeking to address the rising cost of health care. Put together, malpractice and defensive medicine—the practice of making treatment decisions to reduce the likelihood of getting sued—costs the United States billions of dollars per year.
One way policymakers have tried to achieve a reduction in malpractice litigation is by passing laws that encourage physicians to apologize to patients for treatment mistakes. These laws make apologies inadmissible in court, so doctors don’t have to worry that their apologies may be used against them if a patient decides to sue anyway.
“The idea is simply that if providers could just say they’re sorry, that’s what patients really want They really don’t care about punishing the doctor in a financial context; they care about having them express remorse,” says Van Horn. “But what we find is that no, people sue for money. ‘Sorry’ is not enough.”
Using proprietary data from a major malpractice insurer, the researchers were able to analyze malpractice claims for about 90 percent of U.S. providers in a single specialty composed of surgeons and nonsurgeons—about 9,000 providers. Overall, about 4 percent of these physicians experienced a malpractice claim during the course of eight years. About two-thirds of all claims went to court.
For surgeons, they found, apology laws made no difference in either the number of claims or the share of those claims that ended up in court.
For nonsurgeons, however, apology laws had a dramatic effect. While the overall number of claims was unchanged in states with apology laws, those claims were 46 percent more likely to result in a lawsuit. The researchers say that’s probably because surgical errors are usually more obvious than nonsurgical ones: For example, a patient will know that a sponge left inside the body is a surgical mistake, but probably will not have the expertise to know whether his worsening illness is due to bad luck or an overlooked symptom. That is, unless the doctor apologizes for it.
“The laws do protect providers from having their apology introduced in court as evidence that they were at fault, but apologies also alert injured patients to the physicians’ errors and the possibility of making a successful claim,” Viscusi explains.
Even more dramatic was the change in payouts from successful lawsuits. Again, surgeons didn’t see a great difference, but nonsurgeons did. In states with apology laws, the payouts to patients of nonsurgeons more than doubled compared to states without apology laws.
The researchers note that in some health systems that provide training to their providers on when and how to apologize, lawsuits and payouts are, in fact, lower. Additionally, the laws themselves could be improved: Currently, most only protect physicians for expressions of sympathy, not an explanation of what went wrong. However, recent scholarship on apology best practices suggests that victims are more satisfied by apologies that do include an explanation.