Medical Malpractice
This page is about insulin overdose medical malpractice lawsuits. Our lawyers review insulin overdose lawsuits with the strongest claims. We also examine settlement compensation payouts and verdicts in insulin overdose lawsuits.
Our lawyers are based in Maryland, but we handle insulin overdose malpractice claims involving brain injuries or death nationwide. If you have a potential claim, call us at 800-553-8082 or get a free online consultation.
Insulin and Diabetes
Insulin is a hormone produced by the pancreas that helps the body convert sugar, or glucose, from food into energy. After we eat, insulin is released to encourage sugar from the bloodstream to move into cells. People with Type 1 diabetes do not manufacture enough insulin. People with Type 2 diabetes may still produce insulin, but their bodies do not use it effectively and may not produce enough over time.
Having too much glucose in the blood for long periods damages the body. Blood vessels and nerves can be damaged over time. Damaged blood vessels can result in kidney disease, strokes, heart attacks, poor circulation, and other complications.
Diabetes can sometimes be treated simply with a healthy diet and exercise. In other cases, it is treated with laboratory-produced insulin or other medications. Insulin helps people with diabetes live much healthier lives. More than 8 million Americans now rely on insulin.
Insulin Overdose and Hypoglycemia
When taken in the wrong amounts, insulin can cause serious harm. An insulin overdose overcorrects high blood sugar and causes blood sugar to fall below a healthy level.
Symptoms of hypoglycemia, a condition caused by extremely low blood sugar, include anxiety, confusion, fatigue, trembling, extreme hunger, clammy skin, and irritability. Seizures, coma, and even death can follow if hypoglycemia is left untreated.
Blood sugar below 70 mg/dL is considered hypoglycemia. A blood sugar level below 55 mg/dL is more serious and requires immediate action.
Insulin Overdose Treatment
Once detected, hypoglycemia can often be treated quickly. A conscious patient who can safely swallow may be given fast-acting glucose or carbohydrates. Severe hypoglycemia may require intravenous glucose or glucagon.
It is common for diabetics to visit the emergency room for hypoglycemia after taking the wrong type of insulin (e.g., rapid-acting vs. long-acting), confusing dosing units, or not eating enough food.
Problems can also arise when doctors in hospitals and nursing homes fail to monitor a patient’s blood glucose level and symptoms after administering insulin. An insulin overdose can quickly cause severe hypoglycemia. This happens way too often. Insulin has been associated with more medication errors than almost any other class or type of drug. Insulin-induced hypoglycemia causes tens of thousands of emergency room visits every year.
Treatment does not necessarily end when the first low blood sugar reading is corrected. Depending on the amount and type of insulin involved, particularly long-acting insulin, blood sugar can fall again. The patient may require repeated glucose testing and continued treatment.
How an Insulin Overdose Causes Brain Damage
The brain needs a continuous supply of glucose to function. When an insulin overdose drives blood sugar dangerously low, the brain can be deprived of the glucose it needs.
The patient may initially become confused, weak, sweaty, irritable, or unusually tired. If the blood sugar continues to fall, seizures, loss of consciousness, and coma can follow.
Prolonged severe hypoglycemia can cause hypoglycemic encephalopathy, which is brain damage caused by dangerously low blood glucose. Depending on the severity and duration of the hypoglycemia, the patient may suffer memory loss, cognitive impairment, permanent neurological injury, coma, or death.
This is why what looks at first like a simple medication mistake can become a catastrophic medical malpractice case.
How Medical Negligence Causes Insulin Overdose
Maintaining a healthy blood sugar level is complicated. Blood sugar changes throughout the day in response to food intake, digestion, and activity.
There is no single blood sugar range that applies to every diabetic patient in every setting. For many adults with diabetes, common treatment goals include a blood sugar of 80 to 130 mg/dL before meals and less than 180 mg/dL after meals. These targets can be different depending on the patient and the clinical situation. Low blood sugar, or hypoglycemia, is generally defined as below 70 mg/dL.
People with diabetes manage their blood sugar with food, exercise, monitoring, and medications like insulin.
Millions of people monitor their blood sugar using special meters and self-administer insulin in their everyday lives. Hospitals and nursing homes administer insulin to their patients. Insulin overdoses that occur anywhere along the line are sometimes the result of medical negligence. Medical malpractice claims exist to compensate patients and their families for injuries and deaths that happen because of medical negligence.
Medical professionals in pharmacies, hospitals, and nursing homes are responsible for prescribing and administering the correct insulin dosage to their patients. Additionally, hospitals and nursing homes should routinely monitor and record diabetics’ blood sugar levels and watch for symptoms of hypoglycemia, especially after administering insulin.
Proper monitoring will catch mistakes made in insulin dosing and identify symptoms of insulin overdose, allowing medical professionals to correct the problem before it escalates.
Failure by a medical professional to closely monitor diabetic patients’ blood sugar frequently leads to medical malpractice claims. Mistakes in dosing, dispensing, and packaging insulin can also constitute negligence.
Diabetes Medical Negligence and Insulin Dosing Error Claims
Not every diabetes malpractice case involves a massive insulin overdose. Medical negligence in treating diabetes can happen in a number of different ways.
The most obvious example is an insulin dosing error. A doctor orders too much insulin, a nurse gives the wrong dose, the wrong type of insulin is administered, or a patient receives insulin even though he or she is not eating. These mistakes can cause severe hypoglycemia, seizures, brain damage, coma, or death.
But negligent treatment of diabetes can also involve the opposite problem. Doctors and nurses may fail to recognize dangerously high blood sugar, diabetic ketoacidosis, dehydration, infection, or another complication of poorly controlled diabetes.
Hospitals and nursing homes also have to monitor diabetic patients after insulin is given. A reasonable insulin order can become dangerous if the patient’s condition changes, food intake stops, kidney function deteriorates, or the patient’s blood glucose begins falling and no one responds.
So a diabetes medical negligence claim is not simply about whether a patient had high or low blood sugar. The question is whether the doctors, nurses, pharmacists, or other healthcare providers followed the standard of care and whether a mistake in treating the diabetes caused a serious injury.
Our diabetes malpractice lawyers most often see these claims involving insulin dosing errors, failure to monitor blood glucose, failure to respond to hypoglycemia, medication communication errors, and failures to adjust treatment when the patient’s condition changes.
Six Typical Insulin Overdose Malpractice Lawsuits
We see insulin overdose medical malpractice lawsuits from recurring scenarios where doctors and nurses do not follow the standard of care in managing a patient’s insulin therapy. Some of the most common examples of insulin-related medical malpractice lawsuits include:
- Incorrect Dosage Administration: It is frightening how often this happens. Usually it ends up being harmless but administering an incorrect dose of insulin, either too high or too low, leads to severe hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia. This can happen in the same way as other prescription errors — miscalculation, misreading a prescription, and confusion about the different types of insulin.
- Lack of Patient Monitoring: Failing to adequately monitor a patient’s blood glucose levels after administering insulin will often lead to undetected hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia. Proper monitoring is crucial, especially in hospitalized patients or those with fluctuating blood sugar levels.
- Failure to Educate Patients: Not providing patients with proper education and instructions on how to self-administer insulin, recognize signs of overdose, and respond to hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia can result in incorrect usage and potential overdose. This happens, but these are tough malpractice lawsuits to bring because it is often a he said/she said claim, which is not easy against a medical provider.
- Improper Use of Insulin Pumps: Errors related to the use of insulin pumps, such as setting incorrect basal rates or bolus doses, can cause continuous insulin delivery issues leading to overdose.
- Communication Failures: Even with all of the technology we have today to communicate information about a patient downstream, inadequate communication between healthcare providers remains a problem. We see issues such as not updating insulin dosage changes or not conveying critical patient information during shift changes, which can lead to disaster.
- Electronic Health Record (EHR) Mistakes or Handwriting: Errors in electronic health records, such as incorrect entries or system glitches, can result in improper insulin dosing instructions being followed. Even today, there are still handwriting errors that can cause overdoses.
Diabetes mismanagement malpractice lawsuits are rarely difficult to explain to a jury. Some of the insulin overdose cases involve the simplest of mistakes. A nurse gives 80 units instead of 8. A patient receives rapid-acting insulin instead of long-acting insulin. A second dose is given because the nurse does not realize the first dose was already administered. Or a patient who is not eating receives the same insulin dose that was ordered when the patient was eating normally..
Hospital Standards for Preventing Insulin Overdose
Hospitals know insulin is a high-risk medication. A hospital should have a system for identifying, treating, and preventing hypoglycemia.
When a patient’s blood glucose falls below 70 mg/dL, medical providers should treat the immediate problem and determine whether the insulin regimen needs to be changed to prevent another episode.
The problem is not always an obviously ridiculous insulin dose. Hypoglycemia can also occur when the patient’s meal is delayed, the patient stops eating, kidney function changes, tube feeding is interrupted, insulin is administered at the wrong time, or scheduled blood glucose checks are missed.
In some cases, more than one safety net fails. The doctor orders the wrong dose. The pharmacist does not catch it. The nurse administers it. Then no one checks the patient’s glucose while the blood sugar continues to fall.
That is the kind of mistake these lawsuits are about.
Example Insulin Overdose Malpractice Settlement Amounts and Jury Payouts
Below are summaries of verdicts and reported settlements from medical malpractice cases involving insulin overdoses.
Quite often, the defendants in insulin overdose lawsuits are the nurses who incorrectly program the insulin machine. Our insulin overdose lawyers had a case like this at Miller & Zois, where the patient was in the hospital recovering well, and the nurse made a simple mistake that caused the man to slip into a diabetic coma from which he never recovered.
Settlement compensation payouts in insulin overdose cases can sometimes go deep into the millions because of the ongoing care required to care for a patient in a coma.
- 2025 Illinois: $2,000,000 Settlement – Lisa Rivera, a 33-year-old insulin-dependent diabetic, was hospitalized at Our Lady of the Resurrection Medical Center in Chicago. Her family’s lawyers alleged that a change in her diet was not properly documented or communicated while insulin continued to be administered. She suffered severe hypoglycemia and died. Her family alleged that failures in documentation and communication led to the insulin overdose and her death. The wrongful death case settled for $2 million.
- 2021 California: $1,000,000 Settlement – A 90-something woman was admitted to a nursing home. She suffered from several comorbidities, including Type 2 diabetes, COPD, chronic kidney disease, bilateral below-the-knee amputations, and abnormal liver function. She also had an altered mental status diagnosis. The woman was not eating at the facility. Nonetheless, she received full insulin doses. The woman’s neurological functions deteriorated. Five days after being admitted, she was brought to a hospital for hypoglycemia. The woman died less than a week later. Her family alleged negligence against the nursing home. They claimed its staff failed to check the woman’s glucose levels, failed to appreciate her comorbidities, negligently administered insulin, and failed to appreciate her mental state changes. This case settled for $1,000,000.
- 2021 Texas: $6,600,000 Verdict – A 40-year-old woman with diabetes was admitted for gallbladder surgery at Houston Healthcare Perry Hospital. After the procedure, the surgeon mistakenly ordered a large dose of fast-acting insulin, Novolog, which was administered to the plaintiff without being caught by the attending physician or hospital pharmacist. She was found comatose the next morning, spent two weeks in a coma, and required extensive rehabilitation. The plaintiff suffered permanent brain damage, leading to significant cognitive and emotional impairments. The hospital and nurses settled before trial, leaving the surgeon standing alone. The jury gave him a 55% share of the liability.
- 2017 Kentucky: $134,161 Verdict – An 87-year-old man with Type 2 diabetes was admitted to a nursing home. The facility’s nurse practitioner ordered insulin doses five times the normal dose. Two days later, the man experienced a hypoglycemia episode. He also suffered an aspiration complication after the nurse attempted to orally administer Glucotrol while he was unconscious. The man died six days later. His family alleged negligence against the nursing home. They claimed its staff administered excessive insulin doses and improperly administered insulin. The family received a $134,161 verdict.
- 2015 Louisiana: $84,634 Verdict – A 61-year-old man suffered abdominal pains. He was admitted to the ICU. The man received an insulin drip instead of antacids. He experienced a hypoglycemic seizure. The man sustained permanent brain damage. He developed severe memory loss. The man alleged negligence against the hospital. He claimed its staff wrongly administered insulin to a non-diabetic person and failed to administer antacids. The jury awarded only $84,634.
- 2015 Massachusetts: $2,000,000 Settlement – The plaintiff, a 46-year-old woman with Type 1 diabetes, is admitted to the ER in the evening with an extremely high blood sugar of 498 mg/dL. The doctor administers 10 units of insulin. An hour later, a hospitalist orders more insulin to be given to the patient. Three and a half hours later, the patient’s blood sugar drops to 335 after the doctor’s initial dose of insulin. The defendant nurse administers the hospitalist’s additional insulin orders. At this point, the patient has received excess insulin. But she still appears stable with normal vitals. No one monitors her blood sugar levels as the night goes on. In the early morning, she becomes unresponsive and has no pulse. She suffers hypoglycemic encephalopathy, a brain injury caused by severe hypoglycemia. Her blood sugar had dropped to 7 mg/dL. The plaintiff hired an insulin overdose malpractice lawyer who filed a lawsuit. The suit contends the defendants gave the decedent too much medication and failed to monitor her condition, resulting in her death a week later.
- 2014, Iowa: $109,375 Verdict – An adult male is given insulin during a hospital stay. He becomes hypoglycemic and suffers a seizure, which tears muscles and tendons in his right shoulder. The plaintiff hires an insulin malpractice attorney and files a lawsuit alleging that the hospital improperly administered insulin and failed to check his glucose level in time to prevent the injury. He also claims that a hospitalist or endocrinologist should have been consulted promptly. The defendant’s employees are found to be negligent. The plaintiff is awarded $46,875 for compensatory pain and suffering, and $62,500 for hedonic damages, or loss of enjoyment or value of life.
- 2013, North Carolina: $4,000,000 Verdict – At an acute care inpatient facility, the doctor orders insulin glargine once a day at bedtime and Insulin Lispro four times a day for a male patient with a history of diabetes. The patient dies with a blood sugar of 27 the next morning. An insulin overdose medical malpractice lawsuit is filed against the nurse responsible for the patient, claiming that the nurse “failed to act in such a way to treat this matter as a life-threatening situation.” According to the lawsuit, the nurse did not take emergency action, including immediately contacting the doctor, taking notes, or calling his emergency contact. This is a classic communication error, as we discussed above when talking about the most typical insulin error lawsuits. A lawsuit is filed against the doctor for not requiring the nurse to promptly alert him of emergencies. The jury found that the defendant’s negligence was the proximate cause of the patient’s death and that the nurse breached her fiduciary duty to the patient.
- 2008, California: $318,944 Arbitration – A 73-year-old male is in the hospital. He has diabetes. He is being treated with insulin. Instead of 8 units of insulin, a nurse gives him 80 units of insulin. That amount of insulin is a fatal dose, and the patient dies from respiratory distress following brain damage. The defense argues that because the nurse believed the patient was to receive 80 units, she was not negligent. The plaintiff maintains that the decedent’s death resulted from negligence and deviation from standards of care. The plaintiff was awarded $318,944 in damages.
How Much Is an Insulin Overdose Malpractice Case Worth?
There is no meaningful average settlement amount for an insulin overdose malpractice lawsuit. At least, none of our lawyers are aware of one. But even if we did, it would not help you much. As cliché as it is, every case is different.
The strength of the negligence evidence is where it starts when it comes to evaluating diabetes malpractice lawsuits. Some medical malpractice cases involve complicated disputes between experts about diagnosis and medical judgment and we see this is diabetes cases. But, more often, an insulin overdose case is much simpler. If the order calls for 8 units and the nurse gives 80 — and we had a case just like this — there may not be much mystery about whether a mistake was made. The more obvious the malpractice, the better the case.
If you have a responsible doctor or nurse, you shift to causation and damages. The value depends first on the injury. A patient who experiences temporary hypoglycemia and makes a complete recovery has a very different case from a patient who suffers permanent brain damage, falls into a coma, requires lifelong care, or dies. You also have to prove more than the doctor made a mistake. You have to prove that mistake caused you injury.
Age and underlying medical problems matter too. Many insulin overdose cases involve older patients with significant medical problems before the error. Defense lawyers will argue that those conditions reduce life expectancy and damages. We had a case where damages and injury were not significantly disputed. Instead, the battlefield was how long the victim would live. This dispute is a big deal because in cases with lifelong care, the numbers are astronomical.
The verdicts and settlements above can help you understand how these cases are valued. But you cannot take one result and assume another insulin overdose case will have the same settlement value.
Contact Miller & Zois About Insulin Overdose Malpractice
Our law firm has had previous success in insulin error malpractice lawsuits. If you or a family member have been injured by an insulin overdose due to negligent medical care, you may be entitled to financial compensation. Call our medical malpractice attorneys today at 800-553-8082.