Texas Medical Malpractice Facts & Statistics

How Common Are Injuries and Deaths from Medical Negligence in Texas?

Note: This page has been updated to reflect the latest data available from the CDC and the Texas Medical Board as of March 10th, 2026.

Health care providers, decked out in clean uniforms and working in well-scrubbed surroundings project an air of unimpeachable competence and trustworthiness. They perform modern miracles each day whether that’s treating a nasty infection or extending the life of a loved one with the latest surgical procedure.

But the medical profession is not perfect. Doctors and hospitals make thousands of serious errors each year causing unnecessary death and suffering. Many of those errors go unreported. There is no law requiring doctors to publicly admit mistakes and few doctors will do so voluntarily.

According to research published in 1999 by the National Academy Press Institute of Medicine, as many as 98,000 people die in hospitals each year due to preventable medical errors.¹ Institute of Medicine researchers called on the health care industry to raise professional standards and to create better reporting systems so that the health care industry could learn from its mistakes.

Unfortunately, that did not happen. And the death toll due to medical errors continued to rise.

By 2013, deaths due to medical error rose to 250,000, according to a study conducted by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.²

In 2024, a study entitled “Burden of Serious Harms from Diagnostic Error in the United States”, estimated that around 371,000 deaths per year happened in the United States from medical diagnostic errors alone.¹² The Leapfrog Group’s updated 2025/2026 demographic models confidently place the number of lives lost annually to inpatient accidents, injuries, and infections at 160,000.¹³

Because a portion of the 160,000 inpatient deaths naturally overlap with the 371,000 diagnostic deaths (for example, a hospitalized patient dying from an undiagnosed case of hospital-acquired sepsis), these two figures cannot simply be added together to create a cumulative total. Nevertheless, the integration of these models indicates that the true total of annual deaths directly resulting from, or significantly accelerated by, medical errors across all U.S. healthcare settings in 2025/2026 confidently resides in the range of 370,000 to 450,000.

If medical errors were included in the CDC’s 2025 report on leading causes of death, they would rank third in the United States, behind only heart disease and cancer, revealing the true magnitude of the health danger posed by medical malpractice.

Medical Errors Would be a Leading Causes of Death if Included in CDC Data for 2025*

* Provisional CDC Data for 2025 | ** Estimated

Problems that occur most often during medical treatment are failure to diagnose, adverse reactions to medication, and surgical errors. The incidence of medical error during emergency care is even higher.

Have You Suffered a Medical Injury in Texas Due to Negligence?

Despite all of the challenges of pursuing a medical malpractice lawsuit in Texas, the attorneys at Hastings Law Firm have obtained hundreds of settlements and verdicts for those injured by negligent medical professionals. With medical malpractice law offices in Austin, Houston, Dallas and North Dallas, we can handle cases anywhere in Texas. If you’re outside of Texas, we have offices in Phoenix and can handle medical injury claims across the nation through our associate firms. And if you’re unable to travel, we’ll setup a remote consult or come to you.

If someone in your family has suffered a serious injury or death following a medical procedure, you owe it to them to find out who is responsible and whether those injuries could have been avoided. Tommy Hastings and his team will thoroughly investigate your situation at no cost to you and work tirelessly to turn the system in your favor by any lawful means.

Most Medical Mistakes in Texas Go Unreported

Dr. Martin Makary, who was part of the Johns Hopkins team that conducted the study, said that the prevalence of medical errors is not known by the general public because there is no requirement that doctors report medical error as a cause of death.

Makary said he would like to see medical error listed as a cause of death on death certificates. He would also like to see the CDC include medical errors in its annual reporting on the leading causes of death in this country.

In fact, doctors and hospitals rarely own up to medical errors. According to a study published in the November 2013 Journal of Patient Safety, a mere 9 percent of patients surveyed said the hospital voluntarily disclosed medical errors in their case.⁴

Complaints Received by the Texas Medical Board by Year (2021-2025)

In 2025, the Texas Medical Board received 9,655 complaints¹⁰ from patients and their families regarding health care providers in the state. Of those, the board opened formal investigations into 1,550. The remaining complaints were dismissed for one of two reasons: 4,317 were thrown out because the alleged facts did not indicate a potential violation, while another 3,638 were deemed non-jurisdictional, meaning the complaint either involved a licensee not regulated by the Texas Medical Board or did not meet the threshold for a reviewable complaint. The TMB has oversight authority only over certain categories of healthcare professionals.

Medical Mistake Horror Stories – Real Malpractice Cases

Here are some horrific instances of medical malpractice that occurred in other states where injured parties were able to obtain full compensation for carelessly inflicted injuries.

How Do You Prove Medical Malpractice in Texas

Medical malpractice is not uncommon. It happens frequently and more than we appreciate. However, not all adverse medical outcomes amount to medical malpractice.

What does a strong medical malpractice case look like? Texas law requires persons injured by substandard medical care to prove:

Types of Medical Malpractice Claims in Texas

Some cases will have provable negligence from multiple categories. For instance, if a doctor failed to warn about the possibility of a prescription drug addiction and subsequently “over-prescribed” a patient, the physician has acted negligently AND failed to warn to the patient of potential risks.

According to a 2013 study published in the BMJ Open medical journal, “failure to diagnose” was the largest source of malpractice claims, accounting for 26 to 63 percent of all malpractice claims brought against primary care physicians. Researchers found that the most common patient outcome from “failure to diagnose” errors was death, which occurred 15 to 48 percent of outcomes recorded in malpractice claims.

How Much Can You Be Awarded for Medical Malpractice Damages in Texas?

The ability of persons injured by medical malpractice to obtain full compensation for their losses is a controversial topic in Texas. Unlike most states, Texas law severely restricts the amount of compensation that juries can award to medical malpractice victims.

The Texas Medical Malpractice and Tort Reform Act severely restricts that amount of damages that medical malpractice victims can obtain for pain and suffering. Non-economic damages against all doctors and health care providers capped at $250,000. Non-economic damages against health care facilities capped at $500,000.

For cases in which both the treating physicians and the health care facility were negligent, the maximum recovery for pain and suffering is $250,000 – $750,000.

For example, if medical malpractice victim proves $6 million in damages for pain and suffering (not medical expenses or lost wages, etc.), and a jury wants to award $6 million, Texas law forces the judge to cut that award back to $750,000.

Many people believe that limits on the amount of money a jury can award for damages in a medical malpractice case are unconstitutional. To date, five states have constitutional prohibitions against damage caps on medical malpractice claims. Another nine states have had any imposed caps ruled as unconstitutional by their Supreme Courts. And nine additional states have never enacted any statutory caps.

States Without Damage Caps on Malpractice Claims

The following states currently do not have caps on non-economic damages resulting from medical malpractice claims: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wyoming.

Proposition 12 and Texas Malpractice Caps

Texas malpractice victims are not so fortunate. In 2003, Texas voters approved Proposition 12, a measure that amended the Texas Constitution to permit the legislature to create caps on non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases as well as act other kind of civil litigation. As a result, Texas’ caps on medical malpractice awards are protected from claims that they violate the Texas Constitution.

Additional Texas Malpractice Claim Hurdles

Texas law presents several other hurdles for persons injured by medical malpractice. Claims may not be brought more than two years from the date of the incident or completion of treatment, and an expert report must be submitted within 120 days after a defendant’s answer is filed.

How Texas Medical Malpractice Damage Caps Have Impacted Claims

Ten years after Texas lawmakers instituted tort reforms, capping non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases, both the number of lawsuits filed and the dollar amounts paid out plummeted.

Data from the Texas Department of Insurance indicates that medical malpractice claims, including lawsuits, resolved fell by nearly two-thirds between 2003 and 2011. The average dollar amounts paid to victims declined 22 percent to $199,000 per claim.

Statistics compiled from data in the National Practitioner Data Bank indicate that Texas is at or near the bottom in medical malpractice cases brought and in the size of claims. In 2014, Texas ranked 29th among states for the number of medical malpractice claims per capita (0.56). During that same year, Texas malpractice insurers paid out $3.20 per capita, putting Texas 49th among all states in dollar amount of malpractice claims paid.

Proponent of caps on non-economic damages sold the argument that Texas would attract more doctors if medical malpractice costs were lower. While it is debatable whether or not Texas has gained more doctors as a result, it is clear beyond argument that damage caps have made it much less expensive to commit medical malpractice.

The Effects of Medical Malpractice Laws on Texas Residents

Medical malpractice is a serious health problem in the United States. The problem is getting worse not better with medical malpractice now representing the third-leading cause of death in the United States. In Texas, complaints filed with the Texas Medical Board are at an all-time high.

And yet … in Texas the number of medical malpractice claims is falling. In Texas medical malpractice insurers pay less compensation to malpractice victims than in almost every other state in the country.

The cost of medical malpractice in Texas is cheap because the doctors, hospitals, and their insurance companies are not legally required to compensate malpractice victims for all of their losses. Pain and suffering are real injuries, and in most states juries compensate victims in amounts well above the Texas damage caps.

Committing medical malpractice is cheap in Texas for another reason. Many medical malpractice victims are unable to hire legal counsel because the recovery they can obtain is too small to attract the services of competent legal counsel. Remember: damages in a medical malpractice case are composed of “income + medical costs + (capped) non-economic damages.”

In many cases, the indigent, the young and the elderly will not have suffered significant income losses or incurred large enough medical expenses to make litigation against the doctors and insurance companies worthwhile. As a result, losses due to numerous cases of egregious medical malpractice never find their way to the courthouse and are never compensated.

The medical malpractice laws in Texas are not fair. They are not just. And it’s time they are changed.