Public Citizen Releases Database With Names of 371 “Questionable Doctors” in Minnesota
Aug. 6, 2003
Public Citizen Releases Database With Names of 371 “Questionable Doctors” in Minnesota
Consumers Can Search Online for Their Doctor
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen today released new information about 371 physicians who have been disciplined by Minnesota’s state medical board for incompetence, misprescribing drugs, sexual misconduct, criminal convictions, substandard care, ethical lapses and other offenses. Most of the doctors were not required to stop practicing, even temporarily.
Public Citizen has been publishing national and regional editions of its Questionable Doctors database in book form for more than a decade. But now, for the first time, the data about Minnesota are available on the World Wide Web (the books are no longer available). The Questionable Doctors Online Web site is www.questionabledoctors.org. With today’s addition of Minnesota data, the site will have information about doctors in 41 states and the District of Columbia. More than 350,000 people have looked up their doctors on our Web site to see if they are among the 18,000 who have been disciplined.
Consumers can search the list of disciplined doctors for free. For $10, they can view and print disciplinary reports on up to 10 individual doctors over a one-year period in any state listed. The Web site contains information about doctors in Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia and Wyoming. The remaining states will be added in the fall.
The information on the Questionable Doctors site is generally more comprehensive than information on state medical board Web sites. If a doctor has been disciplined in one state, such as Minnesota, but is licensed in multiple states, the Web sites for the other state medical boards will not include the Minnesota discipline. Similarly, if a Minnesota-licensed doctor has been disciplined in another state, that information will not show up on the Minnesota medical board Web site. Questionable Doctors Online includes such cross-references. Questionable Doctors also lists doctors who have been disciplined by federal agencies, such as the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency – information that state board Web sites do not have.
Even when Minnesota takes action against a doctor, it usually doesn’t stop them from practicing. Doctors who were disciplined but are currently allowed to practice in Minnesota include:
- A doctor who was found to have engaged in unethical and unprofessional conduct, who didn’t supervise a physician’s assistant as required under an agreement with the state medical board, and who aided an unlicensed person in the practice of medicine. The doctor was fined $5,000 and reprimanded; and
- A doctor who pled guilty in California to mail fraud for billing insurance companies for services that were not provided. He was forced to surrender his license in New York, and California put him on probation for 60 months. However, while Minnesota records refer to unspecified disciplinary action taken against the doctor, there is no record of the state board requiring him to stop practicing, even temporarily.
“For a number of the offenses committed by Minnesota doctors, the disciplinary actions have been quite lenient,” said Sidney Wolfe, M.D., director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group. “Most Minnesota doctors who committed one or more of the five most serious offenses weren’t required to stop practicing, even temporarily. Therefore, it is likely that they are still practicing and that their patients are not aware of their offenses.”
Counting only the two most serious disciplinary actions taken against a physician in each case, there were 482 disciplinary actions issued against 371 doctors in Minnesota over the 10-year period covered by the Questionable Doctors Online database. For the five most serious offenses, there were: 17 for misprescribing or overprescribing drugs; 11 for substance abuse; and 14 for sexual abuse of or sexual misconduct with a patient.
Of the 14 actions taken against doctors for sexual abuse or sexual misconduct, only one (7 percent) involved license revocation, suspension or surrender. Similarly, of the 17 actions taken for misprescribing or overprescribing drugs, only five (29 percent) involved license revocation, suspension or surrender.
“All too often, state medical boards are more concerned about protecting the reputations of doctors than doing their job, which is to protect unsuspecting patients from doctors who may be incompetent or negligent,” Wolfe said. “Minnesota has a poor record of letting serious and sometimes repeat offenders off the hook.”
Public Citizen also has published a ranking of state medical boards, based on the number of serious disciplinary actions (license revocations, surrenders, suspensions and probation/restrictions) per 1,000 doctors in each state. In 2002, nationally there were 3.56 serious actions taken for every 1,000 physicians. Minnesota ranked No. 42 on the list, with 30 serious sanctions levied against 14,218 doctors, for a rate of 2.11 per 1,000 doctors. Nine states – Wyoming, North Dakota, Alaska, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Arizona, Ohio, Colorado and Montana – disciplined more than three times as many doctors per 1,000 as Minnesota. For the past seven years, Minnesota’s medical board has been in the bottom 10 in the country in Public Citizen’s rating of medical board performance. (To view the ranking, click here.)
Public Citizen recommends that states promptly make public all of their board disciplinary actions, malpractice payouts and hospital disciplinary actions; strengthen medical practice statutes; restructure their medical boards to sever any links with state medical societies; and increase funding and staffing for medical boards.
Public Citizen has long sought greater consumer access to information about doctors, and there have been recent improvements in making that information available. Most state medical boards now provide some physician information on the Internet, but the information about disciplinary actions varies greatly, is often inadequate and can be difficult for people to access.
Information about doctor discipline, including state sanctions, hospital disciplinary actions and medical malpractice awards is now contained in the National Practitioner Data Bank, but that database is kept secret from the public.
“HMOs, hospitals and medical boards can look at the National Practitioner Data Bank, but consumers cannot,” Wolfe said. “It is time we lifted the veil of secrecy surrounding doctors and allowed the people who have the most to lose from questionable doctors to get the information they need to protect themselves and their families.”
The information on the site involves disciplinary actions from 1992 through 2001. Information comes from all 50 state medical boards, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Using the information from the state and federal agencies, Public Citizen created a database containing the doctor’s name, degree, license number, date of birth, location, the disciplinary state or agency, the date of the disciplinary action, the nature of the discipline and available information about the case. Public Citizen asked all the state medical boards to provide information about court actions that may have overruled or changed previous disciplinary actions. Any disciplinary actions that were overturned by courts or for which litigation ended in the doctor’s favor were deleted from the database.
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CONSUMER INFORMATION: Consumers will be able to search for names of disciplined doctors in the online database for free. For a $10 subscription, they can obtain detailed disciplinary reports on up to 10 physicians over a one-year period in any of the states listed. To order on the Internet, go to www.questionabledoctors.org.
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