Provide data free of charge to state boards

The mission of the nation’s 70 state medical boards is to protect the public from the unprofessional or incompetent practice of medicine.

To fulfill that mission, they rely on hospitals, insurers, peers and the public — and tools such as the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) and the Federation of State Medical Boards’ Physician Data Center — to provide them with relevant information to investigate professional misconduct.

The national data bank is a valuable tool, but it is far from the only resource the boards utilize and not without its limitations.

The assertion that boards fail to take needed steps to collect all available information reported to the NPDB is misleading. Hospitals are required, for example, to report adverse privileging information to both the NPDB and the appropriate state medical board within 30 days of the action.

To say that the NPDB is “open” to all state medical boards is only partly true. It is actually “open for a fee,” and its subscription for continuous query is prohibitive at current levels for most states.

In an era when state budgets are hard-pressed and resources for medical boards must be carefully managed, it makes little sense for state regulators to pay to obtain information they should already be receiving from other sources. Many boards simply cannot justify paying NPDB’s fees.

As a patient safety resource, the NPDB should be made available free of charge to the state boards tasked with protecting the public. The federation will continue to advocate for this change, which is both sensible and likely to increase the national database’s utilization.

State medical boards take their duty to protect the public seriously, and any suggestion otherwise is untrue and unhelpful. State boards will continue allocating their resources in a way that prioritizes investigating complaints to ensure they are examined thoroughly and the appropriate action is taken.

Humayun Chaudhry, doctor of osteopathy, is president of the Federation of State Medical Boards.