Feds Admit They Removed Malpractice Data to Protect Physicians

An agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has admitted that it is concealing from public view a publicly-owned malpractice database and admits that it is doing so to protect physicians' "privacy," at the expense of the patients and taxpayers whose tax dollars were used to compile the information and who expect their government to provide them with the information they need to protect themselves from unscrupulous and incompetent physicians.

"Federal law mandates that information about individual physicians remains confidential," Martin Kramer, a federal employee who works as a spokesman for the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), told Medscape Medical News, a trade journal for healthcare professionals. "We have a responsibility to make sure federal law is being followed."

In fact, the database in question --  the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) -- does not reveal information about individual physicians.  It was established by an act of Congress at taxpayer expense in 1968 to give hospitals, insurers, state medical boards, and other government entities a way to check up on physicians, dentists, and other licensed healthcare professionals.

Although the database does not reveal physicians' names or other "confidential" information but reporters and other investigators have sometimes managed to put together information from various sources to identify information about specific doctors.

“We are troubled that the Obama administration appears to have placed the interests of physicians ahead of the safety of patients,” Association of Health Care Journalists President Charles Ornstein said.  in a news release. “Attempting to intimidate a reporter from using information on a government website is a serious abuse of power.”

Slipshod oversight

More commonly, reporters, patient advocacy groups and activists have used data from the NPDB to highlight the failures and, occasionally, successes of the state licensing organizations that are supposed to oversee physicians and protect the taxpayers who own the data in the NPDB from harm.

An incident that apparently contributed to the HRSA decision was an investigative story in the Kansas City Star by reporter Alan Bavley, about the death of Maribeth Chase, an elderly Kansas woman who did not know the neurosurgeon who operated on her had been sued at least 16 times by his patients.

Chase went into a community hospital for relatively routine surgery to remove blood pooling on her brain.  She awoke paralyzed and unable to speak and died a few days later, the Star reported.  The surgeon settled with Chase's family for $1 million.

While consumer groups and journalism organizations have protested HRSA's decision to make public information private, one notable fan of the action is the American Medical Association (AMA).

AMA supports cover-up

The AMA said it considers the NPDB an unreliable source of information about the overall qualifications of physicians.

"The AMA has long opposed public access to the National Practitioner Data Bank and welcomes the decision to stop posting its public data file online to prevent breaches of physician confidentiality in the future," AMA President Peter Carmel said in a written statement to Medscape Medical News. "Duplicate entries, inaccurate data, and inappropriate information in the NPDB provide, at best, an incomplete and haphazard indicator of a physician's competence or quality."

The data that the AMA and HRSA want to hide from the public includes such "confidential" information as:

• Payments in medical malpractice cases (settlements as well as jury awards)
• Adverse actions on licensure, clinical privileges, and membership in professional societies
• Adverse actions taken by the Drug Enforcement Administration
• Exclusion from Medicare and Medicaid
• Criminal convictions

Journalism group posts the info