The study found that nearly half of all hospitals in the United States did not submit a single physician’s name to the National Practitioner Data Bank in the more than 17 years it has existed.
When the database was first created, federal officials estimated that hospitals would report approximately 5,000 cases annually. But since it began 1990, the database has averaged only 650 reports annually, according to the study.
The report points to two troubling factors behind the dangerously low number of hospital discipline reports: 1) lax peer review, including a culture among doctors of not wanting to “snitch” on a colleague; 2) hospital administrators evading reporting requirements by doing things such as imposing discipline of less than 31 days, thereby evading the reporting requirement or giving doctors a leave of absence in lieu of suspensions.
The report makes several recommendations, including amending the Health Care Quality Improvement Act of 1986 to add fines for each instance of a hospital’s failure to report and tying compliance with the act to the hospital accreditation process and Medicare conditions of participation.
Read the Public Citizen release on the physician discipline disclosure study.
