If you were charged with a DUI, your license to drive would be suspended in the state where it was issued.
And thanks to a coordinated effort in the U.S. that exchanges information between state DMVs (called the “Driver License Compact”), you won’t be getting a license in any other locale while that suspension is still in force, either.
But a license to practice medicine… even surgery? Well, that’s another story.
A new investigation has revealed that doctors can bounce from state to state and set up shop new locations… even while banned from practicing in others.
It’s a national scandal — one that should have been fixed long ago. And the bottom line is: If you aren’t familiar with the history of the physician who’s treating you, it may be time to do some digging into their past.
Here’s what you need to know.
Bad medicine reinstated
Little Morgan Brooks was only 2 months old when she was given a laxative at twice the dose an adult should be taking.
A tragic mistake? The Illinois board of professional regulations didn’t think so – because it turns out that Dr. Jay Riseman had ordered the exact same overdose on another baby just a week prior.
Due to that incident and others, Illinois suspended his license for a minimum of five years.
But instead of hanging up his hat, he simply moseyed across state lines to hang up a new shingle in Missouri. And today, he practices at St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City — with a license that’s valid in that state.
“The hardest part is to know he still is practicing medicine,” says Gayle Simpson Bowman, whose mom, Frances, died under Riseman’s watch when he failed to treat the 68-year-old woman for sepsis.
But Riseman is far from the only doctor who’s pulled this trick.
A joint investigation by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Medpage Today discovered that he’s one of over 500 physicians facing serious disciplinary action – including some who’ve been stripped of the right to practice medicine — who have “slipped” though the system and gone on to practice elsewhere.
Experts say, however, that 500 isn’t even close to the real number.
That’s despite the fact that the federal government maintains a database that was created to keep track of malpractice payments, state disciplinary actions, and other restrictions so as not to let disciplined docs jump from state to state without officials knowing their history.
But guess what? The information, contained in over 1.3 million records on file with the “National Practitioner Data Bank,” isn’t available to the general public.
That treasure trove of data on doctors is released only to hospitals, insurers, and state medical boards.
So, why aren’t states making use of this information?
It turns out that that most just don’t bother. As the former director of research for the database said, it’s very “unusual to get queries” from a state looking for details on a doctor.
And of all the meager numbers of inquiries made by medical boards, just two states — Wyoming and Florida — accounted for more than two-thirds of those requests!
If individual states aren’t looking out for your welfare when it comes to the practitioners that they’re granting licenses, how can you protect yourself and your family from one of these devious doctors?
Well, you shouldn’t go by how a particular hospital ranks one of its physicians — as that very well may not tell the whole story.
Riseman, for example, is (unbelievably) characterized by the Kansas City where he currently works as having “served his patients, their families, and his staff with clinical excellence, patience, and insight.”
But there is some good news, because it’s possible to get some information on your own. It will, however, take a bit of sleuthing.
One way is to go to docinfo.org, a search tool run by the Federation of State Medical Boards. Enter a doctor’s name, and you’ll find out which states they are licensed in… and if there have been any “actions” taken against them. To get further details, though, you’ll have to directly contact that state’s medical licensing board.
Another thing you can do is to check out the “Surgeon Scorecard” put together by ProPublica.
It ranks the performance of more than 17,000 surgeons for eight common elective procedures: knee and hip replacements, keyhole gallbladder removal, two kinds of lumbar spinal fusion, neck spinal fusion, and two types of prostate surgery, and that information can be accessed by entering either a hospital’s name, a surgeon’s name, or even your address.
You can find that by going to projects.propublica.org/surgeons.
That way, you can be sure that your doctor hasn’t been given a license to practice bad medicine.
“Prescription for secrecy” John Fauber, Matt Wynn, Kristina Fiore, February 28, 2018, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, projects.jsonline.com