By Terry Baynes

Jan 8 (Reuters) - Physicians on average spend over 10 percent of their careers fighting medical malpractice claims, according to a new study by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the RAND Corporation.

The study, reported on Monday in Health Affairs, is part of a larger project to understand how malpractice claims work and how to improve their efficiency. While concerns about the U.S. medical malpractice system often focus on the expense of litigation, the researchers set out to examine another cost: time.

Using a database from a large national insurance firm that wasn't identified, the researchers examined medical malpractice claims made against over 40,000 physicians. The report's authors found that the average physician spends over four years, or 10 percent of an assumed 40-year career, facing unresolved malpractice claims. The bulk of that time was spent on claims that were later dropped or dismissed, never resulting in payment, the study found.

The time demands were even greater for doctors in high-risk fields, such as neurosurgeons, who had to spend an average of 10 years -- or 30 percent of their careers -- with an open malpractice claim. Psychiatrists spent the least amount of time, an average of 16 months or 3 percent of their careers, defending charges of malpractice.

Co-author Anupam Jena, a professor at Harvard Medical School and physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, said efforts to improve the system should focus not only on capping damage awards but also on reducing the amount of time required to resolve malpractice claims.

Even lawsuits that are dismissed before trial can take around two years to be resolved, he noted. Cases that settle typically take between two and three years, while cases that go to a jury can take around five years to reach a verdict.

The authors recommend a shift to an alternative dispute resolution process similar to the claims management program adopted by the University of Michigan Health System in 2001. Under that model, the university proactively looked for medical errors, disclosed them to patients and used a central review committee to resolve disputes, offering compensation when at fault. From 1995 to 2007, the university found a decrease in the time needed to resolve claims and a reduction in total liability costs.

"The goal of a well-functioning malpractice system should be to reward patients who suffer malpractice both fairly and quickly rather than have them wait five years to get a settlement," Jena said.

The claims data used by the researchers did not indicate if there was a lawsuit, if the case was tried in court or if there was a settlement. Although the authors suggest that the system can be made more efficient, they did not single out plaintiffs' lawyers or lawsuits as the source of the delays.

Linda Lipsen, the chief executive of the leading trial lawyers' group, the American Association for Justice, noted that 98,000 Americans are killed every year by preventable medical errors and countless more face lifelong injuries.

"Policy efforts must put patients first and ensure that justice is not delayed nor limited," she said in a statement.

Other researchers on the study were economist Seth Seabury of the RAND Corporation, Amitabh Chandra of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Darius Lakdawalla of the University of Southern California.

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