NEJM article highlights Malpractice Risk by Specialty

A recent NEJM paper in August 2011 shows the rate of malpractice in different fields of medicine. They obtained physician-level data on malpractice claims from a large, physician-owned professional liability insurer that provided coverage to physicians in USA. The most common specialties in our data were anesthesiology, family general practice, and internal medicine.


What about Nephrology? Well from what I could gather: from their data:
1. Proportion of Physicians Facing a Malpractice Claim Annually was very less , less than 2% . Nephrology was on the bottom of the list. Appears that it is the least likely specialty to be sued in Internal Medicine based on their Figure 1. Pulmonary, Oncology, Cardiology were the most in Internal Medicine.


2. In the Amount of Malpractice Payments, according to Specialty- Nephrology couldn't even be listed as it had fewer than 30 payments.  
Kudos for hardworking and great physicians- Nephrologists!

Ref:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21848463