Bringing information together

Different people have different ideas for what differentiates quality doctors from the rest. Patients, for example, often look at other patient reviews. Some doctors believe that the single best predictor of quality is where a doctor trained for residency. Other clinicians will consider how well-respected a doctor is in the research community. Measuring quality in health care is indeed a difficult problem, as evidenced by the fact that there are entire organizations dedicated to the idea of developing industry standards.

One thing that people agree on, however, is that a board action is a reason for further investigation. Board actions are issued by the medical board that licenses the doctor for a specific state. For example, one doctor claimed to have satisfied the minimum requirement of continuing medical education when he was unable to furnish evidence of it. Another doctor was reprimanded for gross negligence and unprofessional conduct (among other things). Obviously, some board actions are more serious than others and we don't try to make judgments in terms of which ones can be safely overlooked and which ones should eliminate a provider from consideration. We do, however, bring information together from multiple sources so that you don't have to search each database yourself. Here's one provider who is licensed in 26 states (a clean record in each) -- whew! That would be a lot of databases to search.