Learning from failure in healthcare: Dynamic panel evidence of a physician shock effect

Procedural failures of physicians or teams in interventional healthcare may positively or negatively predict subsequent patient outcomes. We identify this effect by applying (non-)linear dynamic panel methods to data from the Belgian Transcatheter Aorta Valve Implantation (TAVI) registry containing information on the first 860 TAVI procedures in Belgium. We find that a previous death of a patient positively and significantly predicts subsequent survival of the succeeding patient. We find that these learning from failure effects are not long-lived and that learning from failure is transmitted across adverse events.