The Detection, Analysis, and Significance of Physician Clustering in Medical Malpractice Lawsuit Payouts.

Objectives: There is evidence that most adverse events result from individual errors and that most malpractice suits with payouts reflect both patient injury and error.

Hypothesis: There are outlier physicians with regard to the frequency and total amount of malpractice payouts.

Methods: Using the public use file of the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), we sought the percentage of physicians who lay above several cutoff points with regard to total amounts of payments and number of payments.