The National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) is a tool used in efforts to protect patients from incompetent, unprofessional, and often dangerous health care practitioners. Since its creation in 1986, the NPDB collects reports on medical malpractice payments, certain medical review actions, and sanctions by Boards of Medical Examiners. Each year, the NPDB provides information to approximately 16,000 hospitals, health care entities, and State and Federal agencies with information about 800,000 license and hospital disciplinary reports and past malpractice payment reports for clinicians.
By law, the confidential information in those reports is available only to hospitals, health care entities, boards of medical examiners or other State licensing boards, and to practitioners requesting information about themselves. The NPDB statute (42 U.S.C. § 11137) ensures that the track record of clinicians is known to the organizations that need to know the most – the hospitals that are considering hiring them or the licensing board that must decide whether to license them to practice in a State.
The NPDB Public Use Data File contains selected variables from medical malpractice payment and adverse licensure, clinical privileges, professional society membership, and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reports (adverse actions) received by the NPDB concerning physicians, dentists, and other licensed health care practitioners. It also includes reports of Medicare and Medicaid exclusion actions taken by the Department of HHS Office of Inspector General.
The file is updated four times a year to include data for periods ending March 31, June 30, September 30, and December 31 of the specified year. The updated file is generally available within 2 months of the listed dates. The current file contains data from September 1, 1990, through June 30, 2025.
The NPDB is prohibited by law from disclosing information to the general public. However, there is statistical data available to the public that does not identify individuals. Federal law (42 U.S.C. § 11137(b)) requires HRSA to present the data in this file in a form that does not permit use of the data alone, or in combination with other available information, to identify any particular health care entity, physician, other health care practitioner, or patient.
Therefore, as a condition of obtaining access to the data, users agree to:
- Not use the dataset alone or in combination with other data to identify any individual or entity or otherwise link information from this file with information in another dataset in a manner that includes the identity of an individual or entity;
- Upon the request of HRSA, return, delete or otherwise permanently dispose of all copies of the data in the dataset that are in their possession;
- When reporting, disclosing or posting data from the dataset, not to identify any individual or entity; and,
- If reposting the dataset or a subset of the dataset, require that third-party users of the data adhere to the same conditions above.
When downloading the Public Use Data File, your contact information is required. It is used only for statistical purposes and is not distributed to other parties. In addition, you must select a file format – Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), or Comma-Separated Values (CSV).
If you or a loved one may have been harmed as a result of medical malpractice in the United States, you should promptly find a medical malpractice lawyer in your state who may investigate your medical malpractice claim for you and represent you or your loved one in a medical malpractice case, if appropriate.
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