House chairman readies legislation to open doctor disciplinary records

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Patients will be able to examine the government's secret dossiers on their doctors, including disciplinary actions and malpractice payments, if a House committee chairman gets his way.

Rep. Tom Bliley, a Virginia Republican who chairs the House Commerce Committee, plans to introduce legislation next week to give the public access to the federal data bank that tracks critical records on health care providers.

Bliley also plans to hold hearings on the legislation early next month with the intention of pushing it through the House before Congress adjourns for the year, committee spokesman Stephen Schmidt said Monday.

While details of the measure are still being finalized, Schmidt said it will be modeled after a Massachusetts law that provides patients with profiles of all physicians licensed in the state, including disciplinary actions and malpractice payments. The profiles are available over the Internet.

Bliley has not decided whether the legislation will require public release of all malpractice payments made by or on behalf of any physician, or just those by health care providers with multiple payments, said Schmidt.

An Associated Press review of the National Practitioner Data Bank earlier this summer found that nearly 500 doctors and dentists across the country have been slapped with at least 10 disciplinary actions and malpractice payments over the past decade.

The data bank was created by a 1986 federal law that requires insurance companies, hospitals and state and federal regulators to report malpractice payments and disciplinary actions against all health care providers.

The government provides a public version of the database but strips out doctors' and dentists' names and other identifying information. Under current law, identifying information and most of the details in the database can be shared only with insurance companies, hospitals and federal and state health care regulators.

The New York Daily News, The Hartford Courant and The Associated Press used that public version of the database and court records earlier this year to identify doctors with large numbers of malpractice payments or disciplinary actions.

The American Medical Association has long opposed public release of the data bank information. The doctors' lobby contends the raw data on malpractice payments does not reflect either physician quality or competence, since only one of every five malpractice settlements involves negligence.

Schmidt said Bliley's legislation will require that malpractice payment information be provided in context, so a physician can be compared with others in the same medical specialty and the same state. He said it also will require references to disciplinary actions or malpractice payments made by the same physician in other states.

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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National Practitioner Data Bank
U.S. House Committee on Commerce

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