TDNet Discover

Abstract: Disciplinary actions across the United States and Washington D.C. have been collected and recorded since the 1960s by state medical boards and since 1990 by the National Practitioner Data Bank. Both highlight the act of a medical board determining whether a healthcare professional should have penalties or actions taken against their license; however, there is a lack of utilization and organization within this documentation as each medical board has variability in the information they report. A proper analysis of the potential trends seen amongst healthcare professions can prove beneficial in promoting quality patient care by being able to identify core issues occurring within a specific state or profession. In this analysis, we collected and coded disciplinary actions in 2023 made against MD, DO, PA, NP, and PharmDs from the reports of Washington D.C. and each state’s public records along with a comparison against the NPDB. ANOVA was used to evaluate for statistically significant disciplinary action rates identified by the state board public records and NPDB Public Use Data File. The results demonstrate statistical significance between disciplinary action rates made by the state boards and the NPDB with significant underreporting by MDs and PharmDs per public records and significant underreporting by NPs per the NPDB. According to state board public records, MDs had the highest average rate of disciplinary actions taken on their license due to explicit patient harm and sexual misconduct. Conversely, PAs had the lowest rate of disciplinary actions due to explicit patient harm while PharmDs had the lowest rate of disciplinary actions for sexual misconduct overall. With further analysis, this difference indicates significant underreporting of sexual misconduct by state boards in comparison to the NPDB. Overall, these notable differences in reporting highlight the importance of consistency in reporting disciplinary actions across all states and professions. Additional studies in reporting patterns would allow future researchers to explore the trends within each profession and specific demographics such as specialty, gender, race, age of the providers, and geographic region. Being able to identify weaknesses and root issues from this research can improve patient care overall in efficiency and quality.