Healthy buzz

2 notes

The court file on this surgeon provided a compelling story in itself, but whether it held broader implications – was he an isolated case or an example of a more general situation – could only be determined by using the National Practitioner Data Bank. In the Data Bank’s Public Use File I discovered 21 Kansas and Missouri doctors who had at least 10 malpractice payments but had never been disciplined. Their payments totaled more than $65 million. This information served the public and would have been impossible to provide without ready access to the NPDB.