Malpractice climate
Every other page in this layer is finished. This one is not, and publishing it unfinished is the point. The dataset that belongs here — National Practitioner Data Bank malpractice payment reports by state and allegation group — is the single highest-value source for this market, and we do not have it.
Status: incomplete, and here is exactly why
The NPDB Public Use File is free and public. Acquiring it requires submitting a form carrying a named individual's name, title and email address, and accepting a data use agreement on their behalf. That is a small thing, and it is still someone's identity being given to a federal system by an automated process. It was not done without asking.
Once acquired, this page will carry: paid malpractice reports by state and by year since 1990; the obstetrics-related allegation groups isolated; payment range distributions by state; and the change over time. It will carry a matching set of limits, because payment reports are not claim counts and neither is a measure of merit.
- Malpractice payment reports in this layer
- None yetNPDB acquisition pending
- Damage cap and certificate-of-merit rules published
- None yetper-state statutory research in progress; only verified states will publish
- Figures estimated to fill the gap
- 0and there will be none
- Other intelligence pages complete
- 4 of 5births, delivery capacity, outcomes, legal market
What will go here, and the limits it will ship with
| Element | Source | The limit it will be published with |
|---|---|---|
| Paid malpractice reports by state, by year | NPDB Public Use File | A payment report is not a claim. Claims that resolve without payment are not in the file, so this measures paid outcomes, not litigation volume. |
| Obstetrics-related allegation groups isolated | NPDB allegation group field | Allegation grouping is as reported. It is not a clinical classification and not a finding of fault. |
| Payment range distributions by state | NPDB payment range field | Ranges, not amounts. No figure here will ever be presented as what any matter is worth. |
| Damage caps, certificate-of-merit and expert rules | State statutes, cited individually | Only states we have verified statute by statute will publish. Partial coverage will be shown as partial, not filled in. |
| Limitation periods, including for a minor’s claim | State statutes, cited individually | Rules vary and carry exceptions. We will link the statute and never paraphrase it as advice. |
A rule that will not relax when this page fills up
Nothing on this page will ever be joined to clinical outcome data. Malpractice payments describe a legal process. Adverse-event rates describe medicine. Correlating them would produce something that looks like insight and is not, and a medical malpractice audience would catch it immediately — correctly.
| Source | What it gives | Access | Status here |
|---|---|---|---|
| NPDB Public Use File | Paid malpractice reports since 1990 by state, profession and allegation group, quarterly | Free, behind a named request form and a data use agreement | Not acquired — awaiting the operator’s consent to submit a named request |
| NPDB Data Analysis Tool | Aggregate views of the same data | Free, browser-based, embedded analytics | Not machine-readable; unsuitable as a data source |
| State court administrative statistics | Civil filing and disposition counts, sometimes by case type | Varies by state; many publish annual reports | Not comparable across states; definitions differ substantially |
| State insurance department filings | Medical liability premium and loss data | Varies; some states publish, most do not | Partial coverage only; not usable nationally |
| State statutes | Damage caps, certificate of merit, expert rules, limitation periods including for minors | Free, primary, but requires verification state by state | In progress. Only states verified statute by statute will publish. |
| Rule | Reason |
|---|---|
| No figure will be presented as what a matter is worth | Law 3 on this site, and a bar-advertising exposure for any firm that repeated it |
| Payment reports will never be described as claims | Matters resolving without payment are absent from the file entirely |
| No state will publish until its statutes are verified individually | A partially verified national table is worse than an incomplete one, because it looks complete |
| Nothing will be joined to clinical outcome data | Different quantities, different collectors, different purposes |
| The acquisition date and vintage will appear on every figure | The file updates quarterly; a figure without a vintage is unfalsifiable |
In the meantime, the four complete pages are births, delivery capacity, outcome measures and legal market capacity.
A limit we will not cross. Nothing on this page links a clinical outcome rate to a legal claim. Adverse-event rates measure medicine. Litigation measures a legal process. They are different quantities, they are collected by different agencies for different reasons, and correlating them would be the fastest way to publish something false. Where we present clinical data and legal data together, it is to describe a market — never to imply that one causes, predicts, or justifies the other.
Sources
- National Practitioner Data Bank — Public Use File — malpractice payment reports; acquisition pending, see Methodology
- CMS Care Compare — Maternal Health · Hospital — PC-02, PC-07a, PC-07b, SM-7; 2024 reporting period
- U.S. Census Bureau — County Population Totals and Components of Change, Vintage 2024 — births by county, 2021–2024
Cite this analysis
Free to reproduce with attribution, including commercially. Charts may be embedded as published.
Birth Injury Marketing. “Malpractice climate.” 24 August 2026. https://birthinjurymarketing.com/intelligence/malpractice-climate/
Journalists and researchers: we will cut this data to your specification — by state, by county, by hospital, by year — and send the underlying CSV, free and without conditions. Ask for a custom cut. We will also tell you what the data cannot support.
Elsewhere in the intelligence layer
Births & delivery volume
Where babies are actually born — county-complete, no suppression.
Obstetric delivery capacity
Which hospitals deliver, which do not, and the 971 CMS does not say.
Outcome measures: the blackout
CMS published zero hospital obstetric outcome scores for 2024. All of them.
Legal market capacity
Offices of Lawyers against births, and what that measure cannot tell you.
How this was built, and what we could not get → · Model your own market → · All states →
Authorship & review
- Author
- Kevin Schwaner, Founder; Chief Marketing Officer. Credentials.
- Last reviewed
- Corrections
- Found an error? Tell us and it goes in the dated corrections log, whether or not it flatters us.