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Most research on patient safety and adverse events has focused on inpatient care, but much of that care has shifted to outpatient settings — there are now about 30 outpatient visits for each hospital discharge. To evaluate how this shift has affected quality of care, researchers used malpractice payment data from the National Practitioner Data Bank to assess the number and size of payments made for adverse events in each setting from 2005 through 2009.
The number of claims declined in both settings from roughly 13,000 total claims in 2005 to nearly 11,000 in 2009, and the decline was more pronounced for inpatient care. The proportion of claims that originated in outpatient settings rose from 42% in 2005 to 43% in 2009. The mean payment per c…