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Reports from state medical boards may not provide credentialing specialists with the full licensing picture

Medical Staff Briefing, June 1, 2010

This is an excerpt from a member only article. To read the article in its entirety, please login or subscribe to Medical Staff Briefing.

When a physician applies to a medical staff, one of the first things that credentialing specialists verify is the physician’s state license. If the license looks clean, the physician must be good, right? Not necessarily. 

Credentialing specialists and members of the credentials committee must consider that a physician’s license is only one piece of the credentialing puzzle. Think of the Delaware physician, Earl Bradley, who was indicted with 471 counts of sexual crimes against 103 children in February, as reported by The New York Times. 

“There were people who knew what was going on, but no one ever reported it to the state medical board—not even a suspicion,” says Lisa Robin, senior vice president of advocacy and member services at Washington, DC–based Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB), the national nonprofit that oversees the 70 medical boards in the United States. “Boards are dependent on the information they receive,” Robin says.

After hearing of the Bradley case, medical staff leaders and MSPs may be worried that their states aren’t taking enough serious disciplinary action against physicians, thus letting problem physicians land at their doorsteps. Whether a state’s medical board takes a high or low number of serious disciplinary actions against physicians, credentialing specialists across the country should understand all of the factors that affect the number of actions a board takes during any given year.

This is an excerpt from a member only article. To read the article in its entirety, please login or subscribe to Medical Staff Briefing.

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