A Public Citizen report released on October 1, 2024 entitled Ranking of the Rate of State Medical Boards’ Serious Disciplinary Actions, 2021-2023 examined the extent to which medical-licensing boards are taking actions to protect the public from licensed physicians who injure patients or behave inappropriately or illegally. Covering state medical boards’ serious disciplinary actions from 2021 to 2023, the report builds on previous reports from Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, the most recent of which covered serious disciplinary actions from 2019 to 2021.
The Executive Summary of the report stated, in part:
As there is no reason to believe that physicians in any one state are more or less likely to be incompetent or miscreant than the physicians in any other state, we calculated the rate of serious disciplinary actions per 1,000 physicians licensed by boards in each state. Thirty-seven states plus the District of Columbia each have one board that licenses both M.D.s (Doctors of Allopathic Medicine) and D.O.s (Doctors of Osteopathic Medicine). Thirteen states have separate licensing boards for M.D.s and D.O.s. We used state-level data that includes physician type (M.D. or D.O) from the National Practitioner Data Bank’s (NPDB’s) Public Use Data File dated March 31, 2024. We defined “serious disciplinary actions” as those that had a clear impact on a physician’s ability to practice. We added the number of serious disciplinary actions taken by each state licensing board for 2021, 2022, and 2023 and then divided this total by three to obtain the average number of serious disciplinary actions for each board per year during the three-year period. We obtained data on the number of physicians licensed by each state medical board from an interactive map on the Federation of State Medical Boards website. We ranked boards by their average annual rate of serious disciplinary actions for the 2021-2023 period. We excluded boards with fewer than 5,000 licensees from the rankings.
The 64 medical boards, including the ten that were not ranked, took 1,289 serious disciplinary actions in 2021, 1,250 in 2,022, and 1,196 in 2023. With an average annual rate of 1.82 serious disciplinary actions per 1,000 physicians, Ohio had the strongest record of disciplining doctor misconduct for the 2021-2023 period. The Michigan Osteopathic board ranked second, Wisconsin third, and North Dakota fourth. Of the 54 ranked boards, 40 had rates that were less than half that of Ohio’s. With a rate of only 0.17 serious disciplinary actions per 1,000 physicians per year, the Indiana board ranked lowest. The rate of serious disciplinary actions taken by the Ohio board was almost 11 times higher than the rate of serious actions taken by the board in the neighboring state of Indiana. Other boards with low rankings included Georgia, the Pennsylvania Allopathic Board, Delaware, and South Carolina.
The report concluded, in part:
The state licensing boards could and should do a much better job of protecting the public from incompetent and miscreant physicians. If all the licensing boards, including the unranked small boards, had taken serious disciplinary actions at the same rate as the highest-ranked board (Ohio) during the 2021-2023 period, there would have been 2,803 serious actions taken during 2023, about 2.34 times more than the 1,196 actions that were actually taken.
Implementing the reforms called for in this report could reduce the health risk to thousands of patients being injured by the minority of physicians who should not be practicing or should have their practices restricted but are still fully licensed because of inadequate discipline by state boards. If adopted, the reforms could help correct the deficiencies we have identified in the performance of state medical boards. Even the best-rated boards and the public they serve would benefit from their adoption. These reforms are urgently needed in states whose boards have the lowest rates of serious disciplinary actions against physicians. Most physicians are competent and provide appropriate medical services. These physicians would also benefit from improvements to the system for regulating physicians, thereby raising the quality of medical practice in their states.
If you or a loved one may have been harmed as a result of an incompetent physician 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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