Hospitals avoid reporting disciplined docs
Filed under: Health data, Hospitals, Hot Health Headline, Public records
The nonprofit group Public Citizen has released a report showing that hospitals nationwide are taking advantage of loopholes to avoid reporting disciplined physicians to a national database. The full report is available here.
The law requires hospitals to report any physician whose admitting privileges have been revoked or restricted for more than 30 days to the National Practitioner Data Bank, but over the database’s 17 years of existence, almost half the nation’s hospitals haven’t reported a single patient. Initially, officials estimated the database would get around 5,000 submissions a year. Instead, it has averaged around 650.
The report says that hospitals avoid the reporting requirement by limiting suspensions to fewer than 30 days or by giving doctors a leave of absence instead of a suspension. Lax peer review is also contributing to under-reporting, as doctors are reluctant to “rat out” their peers.
The data is easy to break down on a state-by-state level, and folks such as the Miami Herald’s John Dorscher, the Detroit Free Press’s Patricia Anstett and the Contra Costa Times‘ Sandy Kleffman have already reported local versions of the story.
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2 Comments on Hospitals avoid reporting disciplined docs
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Data Mine reports on access to practitioner data : Covering Health on
Thu, 25th Mar 2010 9:01 am
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AHCJ, other journalism organizations protest removal of data from public website : Covering Health on
Thu, 15th Sep 2011 2:56 pm
[...] report last year from Public Citizen revealed that hospitals take advantage of loopholes to avoid reporting disciplined physicians to the [...]
[...] • Hospitals avoid reporting disciplined docs: The nonprofit group released a report showing that hospitals nationwide are taking advantage of loopholes to avoid reporting disciplined physicians to a national database. The Miami Herald’s John Dorscher, the Detroit Free Press’s Patricia Anstett and the Contra Costa Times‘ Sandy Kleffman reported local versions of the story that are no longer available online. [...]
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