The Cost of Defensive Medicine on 3 Hospital Medicine Services

The overuse of tests and procedures due to fear of malpractice litigation, known as defensive medicine,1 is estimated to cost $46 billion annually in the US,2 but these costs have been measured only indirectly. We estimated the cost of defensive medicine on three hospital medicine services in a health system by having physicians assess the defensiveness of their own orders. We hypothesized that physicians who were concerned about being targeted...