When a patient goes into the hospital, there is always the chance of something going wrong. Nobody wants to deal with this reality, but medical malpractice claims are probably much more common than most people think. According to Modern Healthcare, the majority of medical malpractice claims are due to diagnosis errors.
The numbers substantiating this come from a malpractice server, and it found that nearly 33% of all malpractice claims were due to issues during diagnosis. This means that the root of the majority of malpractice come from patients being told that they have an illness or injury that they do not have: thus these patients end up being treated for something inappropriately.
This high level of misdiagnosis largely comes from physicians failing to engage in proper evaluation: many times doctors will not collect adequate information on family history when making important medical decisions. Lab testing also was the source of a lot of problems: many times doctors request that the patient undergo unnecessary lab work resulting in misleading data, or the doctor receives the correct data and then interprets it incorrectly.
Interestingly enough, nearly 14% of malpractice claims end up specifically targeting radiologists. The reasons for this is that reports generated by radiologists can be complicated and long, and this makes it easy for the physician in question to not receive important information related to the patient.
The reason for these errors overall is often attributed to the heavy workload that many physicians are managing. The more patients and the more stress there is in the workplace, the more likely it is that they will make a mistake.
