How Many Medical Malpractice Deaths Per Year

Medical Malpractice Deaths Per Year in the US

There’s no single agreed-upon number, but the research gives a pretty wide range. A 2016 Johns Hopkins study published in The BMJ put it at over 250,000 annually. More recently, a 2023 study from the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute estimated that diagnostic errors alone cause around 371,000 deaths a year, plus another 424,000 cases of permanent disability.

Part of why the numbers vary so much comes down to definition. A preventable adverse event in a hospital isn’t automatically the same thing as medical malpractice in the legal sense, and a lot of malpractice-related deaths never get flagged as such on a death certificate or in a lawsuit. Medical errors also aren’t tracked as an official cause of death by the CDC, so no government agency publishes one definitive count.

What most researchers do agree on is that the number is large, at minimum tens of thousands a year, and likely far higher once every kind of preventable error is counted. For the full breakdown of these studies, along with current data on malpractice claims and settlements, see Munley Law’s medical malpractice statistics page.