Obesity and trends in malpractice claims for physicians and surgeons

The increasing prevalence of obesity has altered the practice of medicine and surgery, with the emergence of new operations and medications. We hypothesized that the landscape of medical malpractice claims has also changed.

We queried the Physician Insurers Association of American database for 1990 through 1999 and 2000 through 2009 for cases corresponding to International Classification of Diseases, 9th edition, codes for obesity. We extracted adjudicatory outcome, closed and paid claims data, indemnity payments, primary alleged error codes, National Association of Insurance Commissioners severity of injury class, procedural codes, and medical specialty data.

A total of 411 obesity claims were filed from 1990 to 1999 and 1,591 obesity claims were filed from 2000 to 2009. General surgery was the specialty with the greatest number of obesity claims from 1990 to 1999 and was second to family practice for 2000 to 2009. Although the percentage of paid general surgery obesity claims has decreased significantly from 69% in 1990-1999 to 36% in 2000-2009, the mean indemnity payments have increased substantially ($94,000 to $368,000).

Recently, the percentage of paid general surgery obesity claims has significantly decreased; however, individual and total indemnity payments have increased. Obesity continues to impact general surgery malpractice substantially. Efforts to manage this component of physician and hospital practices must continue.