More than half of all med-mal payouts can be traced to just 1.8% of doctors, says Robert Oshel, a veteran of the US Department of Health and Human Services who worked on the National Practitioner Data Bank, an electronic repository of med-mal payments and adverse actions relating to physicians and other healthcare providers. And yet, says Oshel, of this tiny group, “only one in seven have had action taken against them by any state.”….medscape.com, Do Frequent Malpractice Offenders Often Get Away With It? Wayne J. Guglielmo, MA, 2021
More than half of all med-mal payouts can be traced to just 1.8% of doctors, says Robert Oshel, a veteran of the US Department of Health and Human Services who worked on the National Practitioner Data Bank, an electronic repository of med-mal payments and adverse actions relating to physicians and other healthcare providers. And yet, says Oshel, of this tiny group, “only one in seven have had action taken against them by any state.”
First, medical boards are far quicker to discipline doctors who have broken the law — by, say, overprescribing opioids — than those who have committed malpractice, even multiple times.
“State medical boards have the authority to take disciplinary action if the [state] medical practice act is violated,” the Federation of State Medical Boards told CBS News in a statement. “A medical malpractice claim does not necessarily mean there was a violation of a medical practice act or grounds for a finding of unprofessional conduct.” However, some say that multiple claims by the same doctor may well mean precisely that.
Second, while some medical boards include nonphysician members, many do not, which could raise questions of impartiality.