Over 40% of all doctors get sued during their careers

Ninety-five medical liability claims are filed for every 100 physicians, according to a report by the American Medical Association (AMA).

Other highlights in the report include:5% of doctors are sued in any given year.General surgeons and obstetricians/gynecologists get sued five times as often as pediatricians and psychiatrists. Nearly half of OB/GYNs are sued by the age of 40.90% of general surgeons age 55 and over have been sued.65% of claims were dropped, dismissed or withdrawn; 25.7% were settled; 4.5% were decided by alternative dispute mechanism; and 5% went to trial.Physicians win 90% of cases that go to trial.Average defense costs per claim were $40,649, ranging from a low of $22,163 among claims that were dropped, dismissed or withdrawn to a high of over $100,000 for tried cases.Median paid claims were $200,000 for settled claims and $375,000 for tried claims.Men were sued twice as much, likely because they are concentrated in high-exposure fields such as surgery compared to women, who concentrate in lower-risk fields. Also, men work on average longer and more hours per week, and they're more likely to be practice owners, who get sued more often.Approximately 45% of solo physicians had been sued, compared to 37% of physicians who provided care in multispecialty groups and 40% of those in hospitals.

The AMA report called for tort reform. The data are from the American Medical Association's 2007-2008 Physician Practice Information survey, which is used primarily for developing practice expense relative value units for the Medicare Physician Fee Schedule but also collected information on a number of other topics. It was jointly funded by the AMA and over 40 national medical specialty associations.

A stratified sample was drawn from the AMA Masterfile across 42 Medicare specialties and had a final size of 5,825 doctors who worked at least 20 hours in their most recent week of practice.