At Health Journalism 2009's "State oversight of health professionals" panel, Gina Barton (investigative reporter, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel) provided reporters with a tip sheet including her recommendations on how to go about investigating health professionals. She details the data reporters need to find and tells them how best to find it.
1. When investigating doctors or other licensed health care professionals, start with the civil courts. Doctors who have avoided state oversight may have been sued repeatedly for malpractice. Even in civil suits where doctors prevail, files may contain interesting information about the doctor's history or about previous complaints.
2. Get a database from your state's licensing authority of actions they have taken against doctors. Ask for any and all formal board actions, including orders for continuing education, since sometimes serious complaints are handled with less-than-serious discipline. Some states will send only a database of all licensed doctors. Most of those states include a column for "discipline," "formal information," or something similar that will allow you to sort out the doctors you need. In that case, you will need to hand enter each doctor's name into the licensing authority's web site to determine what kind of action was taken.
3. Also from the licensing authority, request a database of physicians who were investigated but not disciplined, and access to the investigative files for those cases. The database should be available; the investigative files may not be, or may be heavily redacted. Still, it's worth asking.
4. Ask the licensing authority for a list of referrals to the state from the National Practitioner Data Bank and from your state's Commissioner of Insurance, indicating that an insurance payment has been made on a doctor's behalf. This will help you identify malpractice complaints that were settled out of court or before a lawsuit was filed.
5. Wisconsin also has a group of regulators called the Medical Mediation Panels. Patients must file a complaint there before they can file a lawsuit. We were able to get case histories on specific doctors from the Panels. These histories date back to the 1970s and include cases that were settled in mediation, eliminating the need for a lawsuit to be filed. Ask some malpractice attorneys if something similar exists in your state.
6. Don't forget to check for criminal records, both at the state level and in the federal system. Federal dockets can be accessed through a subscription to PACER.
