Thousands of people in the United States are affected by dental malpractice each year. According to the American Board of Legal Medicine, 13.1% of all claims for professional malpractice are filed against dentists. Other statistics show that in any one year, 1.6% of dentists will face a civil malpractice lawsuit. Some of the top negligence categories include:
New York patients who are scheduled to have a surgery that uses computers to assist in the procedure may be interested to learn that in February, a patient’s heart surgery was stopped for five minutes when a computer began doing an automatic virus check. Although the patient, who was sedated at the time, was not harmed, the incident does highlight the vulnerability of such systems to errors that could potentially be life-threatening.
According to studies, diagnostic errors occurred in approximately 5% of outpatients every year in the United States, meaning that roughly 12 million adults are victims of misdiagnosis. A small fraction of this 5% is made up of missed cancers, but it is found that “delayed cancer diagnosis” is one of the most harmful and costly types of diagnostic errors.
In 2013, the total payout in medical malpractice was $3,733,678,100, which was an increase of 4.7% from 2012. 38 states had more payout than they did in 2012.
During the fiscal year 2008, 54 reported transfusion-related and potentially transfusion-related fatalities occurred in the United States, with subsequent reports of 66 in 2009 and 64 in 2010. Preventable medical errors rank third among the leading causes of death in the nation, claiming more than 400,000 lives each year. These errors cost the country tens of billions of dollars a year.
