Online tools usually take a handful of inputs—like medical costs, diagnosis severity, and treatment duration—and generate a rough range. That can help you sanity-check the conversation you’re having with family or even what an insurer might cite.
But a calculator generally cannot:
- determine whether Washington law will recognize the provider’s conduct as a deviation from the accepted standard of care
- evaluate the key issue of causation (whether the mistake caused the specific harm)
- measure how persuasive your medical records and expert review will be
- account for disputes that frequently arise in malpractice claims, such as pre-existing conditions, delayed escalation of care, or whether later treatment broke the chain of causation
In other words, think of a calculator as a starting point, not a prediction.


