Hospitals increasingly have checklists and protocols to ensure that they follow best practices and avoid errors and acts of medical malpractice.

More doctors' offices should have similar safeguards in place.

That is the conclusion of a team of medical researchers from the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York that has just finished a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In findings they call "unexpected," the team calculated that medical errors occur at about the same rate in both hospitals and doctors' offices. Those results came from examination of the National Practitioner Data Bank over a several-year period, a database that contains information relating to malpractice claim payments.

"We were actually very surprised by that finding," says Tara Bishop, the study's lead researcher, noting that many more surgeries and complex treatments occur in the hospital setting.

But that is changing and accounts for why a near equal number of adverse outcomes result in private offices and clinics. Bishop cites the "invasive and high-technology diagnostic and therapeutic procedures that are increasingly being performed in the outpatient setting."

And the errors are often far from insubstantial, with death and severe injuries being the most common reason for bringing a legal claim.

Although the number of adverse events is roughly similar, the types of errors that most commonly occur are different in doctors' offices and hospitals, respectively. In the former, misdiagnosis is a predominant problem, whereas surgical errors are more prevalent in hospitals.

That means that different types of efforts are required to lower the incidents of malpractice. Hospitals need to tightly adhere to those checklists, while doctors in private settings need to communicate better with their patients.

Related Resource: Reuters, "Medical errors don't just happen at hospitals: Study" June 20, 2011