Indiana is one of the few states where medical malpractice claims data is published, in detail, every year, by the agency that pays the claims. The Indiana Department of Insurance administers the Patient's Compensation Fund, the Fund publishes an annual report, and the report contains counts of complaints filed, medical review panel opinions and how they came out, payments by quarter with case-type and provider-type breakdowns, and a financial history back to 1975. This article sets out what the most recent report shows, explains the statutory structure that produces those numbers, and points to the federal data that complements it. Every figure below is from a linked public source. Where a figure could not be sourced, it is not here.
Three public sources cover Indiana malpractice claims.
Indiana caps a claimant's total recovery, not only non-economic damages. IC 34-18-14-3(a) sets the total amount recoverable for an injury or death of a patient by the date of the act of malpractice: $500,000 for an act before January 1, 1990; $750,000 for an act after December 31, 1989 and before July 1, 1999; $1,250,000 for an act after June 30, 1999 and before July 1, 2017; $1,650,000 for an act after June 30, 2017 and before July 1, 2019; and $1,800,000 for an act after June 30, 2019.
The cap is paid in two layers. Under subsection (b), a health care provider qualified under the Act is not liable for more than $250,000 for an act after June 30, 1999 and before July 1, 2017, $400,000 for an act after June 30, 2017 and before July 1, 2019, and $500,000 for an act after June 30, 2019. Any amount due from a judgment or settlement in excess of the total liability of all liable health care providers is paid from the Patient's Compensation Fund. So for a current occurrence, the provider (in practice its insurer) is responsible for up to $500,000, and the Fund pays the excess up to the $1,800,000 total.
The Indiana state page covers the cap, the two-year occurrence-based limitation period, and the practical sequence of settling with the provider and then petitioning the Fund for excess damages.
Before a claim against a qualified provider can be filed in court, it goes through a medical review panel. The statutory pieces:
The 2024 Annual Report's Panel Summary Report lists, for 2024: 811 proposed complaints filed, 167 PCF payments, and 144 panel opinions, of which 11 found malpractice, 98 found no malpractice, 2 found a material issue of fact, and 33 were recorded as a variation of opinion (a panel that did not reach a single conclusion). Of the 144 opinions entered in 2024, 98, or about 68 percent, found no malpractice, and 11, or about 8 percent, found malpractice; the rest were split or referred as fact questions.
The same summary lists 662 complaints filed in 2022 and 825 in 2023.
The report presents Fund payments by quarter. For calendar 2024 the four quarterly tables list $55,070,252.00 paid on 57 claims (January to March), $32,140,892.32 on 37 claims (April to June), $53,161,427.72 on 56 claims (July to September), and $29,597,328.00 on 33 claims (October to December). Summed, that is 183 claims and about $169.97 million for the year, which lines up with the $170,465,701 in "Judgments Paid" in the report's financial table for 2024 (the two figures are from different tables and are not identical).
Each quarterly table also gives the Fund's average payment by the cap tier in force at the time of the act. On cases under the current $1,800,000 cap, the average Fund payment was $1,127,142.85 in the first quarter, $852,727.27 in the second, $1,130,147 in the third, and $1,080,714 in the fourth. Remember what that figure is: the Fund's share above the provider's $500,000, on claims that reached the Fund at all. It is not the average value of an Indiana malpractice claim, most of which never reach the Fund.
The tables break payments down by case type and provider type. In the fourth quarter of 2024, for example, wrongful death of an adult was 39 percent of paid cases and personal injury of an adult 43 percent, with wrongful death of a child and personal injury of a child at 9 percent each; by provider, 31.56 percent of the quarter's payout involved a hospital, 33.87 percent a physician, 1.79 percent a nursing home, and 32.79 percent all other provider types. The mix moves quarter to quarter; adult death and adult injury together account for the large majority of paid cases in every quarter of 2024. The quarterly tables list one, none, two and one verdicts paid, so almost all Fund payments were on settlements.
The Fund is financed by a surcharge on qualified providers. The 2024 report's table of providers by specialty code lists 41,243 providers across 138 specialty codes; its table by carrier lists 43,512 providers across 133 carriers with a total surcharge of $150,766,028 (the two tables count providers differently, and the report presents both). The financial table records $150,243,729 in surcharge collected for 2024. Within the specialty table, 154 hospitals paid $49,979,148, the largest single line; emergency medicine (no major surgery) had 1,448 providers paying $7,674,554. The surcharge is what buys a provider the Act's protection: the cap, the panel and the Fund's excess layer.
The financial table runs from the Fund's creation in 1975. Over that period it records $3,718,600,807 in surcharge collected, $3,543,136,762 in judgments paid, $64,318,609 in administrative expenses, and a balance carried forward of $234,540,777. For 2024 alone: $150,243,729 surcharge, $12,715,550 interest, $170,465,701 judgments paid, $4,117,042 administrative expense, and an annual loss of $11,612,290. Payments in the $120 to $170 million range have been typical of the last decade in the table.
The cumulative Panel Summary, 1976 through 2024, lists 36,996 complaints filed, 20,051 panel opinions, of which 3,286 found malpractice, 12,981 found no malpractice, 806 found a material issue of fact and 2,974 were a variation of opinion, and 3,696 PCF payments. On those counts, about 16 percent of all panel opinions ever entered found malpractice and about 65 percent found none. The 2024 year sits slightly below that long-run rate of malpractice findings.
The Fund's report has one structural limit: it counts claims within the Act and payments the Fund made. It does not directly report payments that never exceeded the provider's layer, or claims against non-qualified providers. The federal National Practitioner Data Bank fills some of that gap from the other direction. Its Public Use Data File contains selected variables from medical malpractice payment reports and adverse action reports on physicians, dentists and other licensed practitioners, refreshed quarterly, currently covering reports from September 1, 1990 through June 30, 2026, with no information that identifies an individual practitioner or reporting entity. The Data Analysis Tool lets a user generate datasets of payment reports and adverse actions for 1990 through June 30, 2026, filter by state and profession, view a map, and export to CSV.
This article does not quote Indiana totals from the NPDB, because the figures are generated interactively in the tool and there is no fixed public page to cite; pull them yourself with the state filter and record the date and settings. Two cautions when you do. NPDB reports are payments on behalf of individual practitioners; a payment by a hospital on its own behalf with no practitioner named is not reported, so the NPDB undercounts institutional payments. And NPDB figures and the Fund's figures will not match, because they count different things over different periods.
Aggregate claims data does not value a case, and nobody should cite the Fund's average payment to an adjuster as if it did. What the data does is describe the system a claim has to pass through, and that has two practical uses.
First, the panel outcome distribution tells a plaintiff what the submission has to accomplish. In 2024 roughly two of three panels found no malpractice. The panel's opinion is admissible later and shapes settlement, and a unanimous adverse opinion generally supports a defense summary judgment motion unless the plaintiff comes forward with admissible expert testimony. The submission therefore has to put a cited chronology and a qualified expert's opinion in front of three physicians who will read it critically, and it has to do that within the two-year occurrence-based limitation period, which the filing of the proposed complaint tolls.
Second, the cap tiers tell both sides where a serious case is going. A catastrophic injury with a life care plan several times the cap is, in Indiana, a $1,800,000 case: $500,000 from the provider and up to $1,300,000 from the Fund. The valuation question becomes how efficiently to reach the cap, and the Fund's payment history shows that it does pay, on the order of 180 claims and $170 million a year, almost entirely by settlement.
All of that starts with the record. The Case Analysis tool reads the medical record and the intake facts, identifies the standard-of-care questions at each decision point with the page cited, and organizes them in the form a panel submission or an expert review needs. It does not predict how a panel will vote; the numbers above are the closest anyone can get to that, and they are averages over hundreds of cases that are nothing like yours.
The Indiana Patient's Compensation Fund's 2024 Annual Report lists 811 proposed complaints filed in 2024, 825 in 2023 and 662 in 2022. Those counts cover claims under the Medical Malpractice Act against qualified providers, which is nearly all malpractice claims in the state.
In 2024, of 144 panel opinions listed in the Fund's Panel Summary, 11 found malpractice, 98 found no malpractice, 2 found a material issue of fact and 33 were a variation of opinion, so about 8 percent found malpractice and about 68 percent found none. Cumulatively from 1976 through 2024, 3,286 of 20,051 opinions found malpractice, about 16 percent.
Under IC 34-18-14-3, total recovery for an act of malpractice after June 30, 2019 is capped at $1,800,000, of which a qualified provider is liable for no more than $500,000 and the Patient's Compensation Fund pays the excess. Earlier acts fall under lower caps: $1,650,000 for acts from July 1, 2017 through June 30, 2019, and $1,250,000 for acts from July 1, 1999 through June 30, 2017.
The 2024 Annual Report's quarterly payment tables list 183 claims paid totaling about $169.97 million, and its financial table lists $170,465,701 in judgments paid for the year. On claims under the current $1,800,000 cap, the Fund's average payment ranged from $852,727 to $1,130,147 by quarter; that figure is the Fund's share above the provider's $500,000, not the total received by the claimant.
IC 34-18-7-1 requires the claim to be filed within two years after the date of the alleged act, omission or neglect, regardless of when the injury was discovered, except that a minor less than six years of age has until the minor's eighth birthday. Filing the proposed complaint with the Department of Insurance for the panel process is what tolls the period.
Case Analysis reads the record and the intake facts, flags the standard-of-care questions at each decision point with the page cited, and organizes them in the form a panel or an expert needs. Free to start.
Open Case Analysis →Sources. Indiana Department of Insurance, Indiana Patient's Compensation Fund 2024 Annual Report (PCF Activity 2024; PCF Financials 2024; Panel Summary Report 2024; Providers by Specialty Code 2024; Surcharges by Carrier 2024; PCF Payments January 2002 through December 2024), from the PCF Annual Reports page. Indiana Code Title 34, Article 18: IC 34-18-14-3, 34-18-10-3, 34-18-10-13, 34-18-10-22, 34-18-8-6, 34-18-7-1 (quoted). National Practitioner Data Bank, Public Use Data File and Data Analysis Tool. Percentages in the text are computed from the report's own counts and are rounded. No NPDB state totals are quoted because they are generated interactively; no figures from law-firm or insurance marketing pages are used.
MedLegal AI is software, not a law firm. This article is general information for attorneys, paralegals, legal nurse consultants and patients; it is not legal or medical advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Verify every statute, rule and figure against the current source before relying on it. Questions: [email protected]