All Entries Tagged With: "NPDB"
Confusing peer review laws hinder NPDB reporting, AMA article says
Previous research has suggested that medical staffs don’t report practitioners to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) as often as they should. But why? One factor might be confusing peer review laws, according to an AMNews article.
The NPDB requires medical staffs to report practitioners if it restricted or revoked the practitioner’s privileges for more than 30 days based on competency problems or professional misconduct.
However, hospitals choose to deal with competency problems and professional misconduct in different ways, and if they don’t involve privilege suspension, they may not be reported to the NPDB.
Hospitals not reporting to NPDB, study claims
Hospitals are not reporting practitioners to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) as often as they should, claims a new study by Health Research Group, a branch of the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen.
(How does your organization’s reporting practices compare to others? Take our poll at the end of this post to find out.)
The following is an excerpt from the study:
“As of December 2007, almost 50 percent of the hospitals in the U.S. had never reported a single privilege sanction to the NPDB. Prior to the opening of the NPDB in September 1990, the federal government estimated that 5,000 hospital clinical privilege reports would be submitted to the NPDB on an annual basis, while the health care industry estimated 10,000 reports per year. However, the average number of annual reports has been only 650 for the 17 years of the NPDB’s existence, which is 1/8th of the government estimate and about 1/16th of the industry estimate.”