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HHS offers conditional public access to data bank records

NEWS IN BRIEF — Posted Dec. 5, 2011

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The Dept. of Health and Human Services' Health Resources and Services Administration in November restored public access to deidentified National Practitioner Data Bank records of adverse actions against physicians such as medical liability payments, medical board disciplinary actions and peer review sanctions. But that access will come with the restriction that reporters and others must agree not to use the information to identify individual physicians, according to a notice posted Nov. 9 by HRSA Administrator Mary K. Wakefield, PhD, RN.

The public-use file was taken down Sept. 1 after HRSA learned that it had been used by a reporter, in combination with court records, to identify actions reported to the data bank about a doctor in Kansas. Consumer-advocacy and journalism groups protested the move and said the new conditional-access rules veered close to prior restraint on freedom of the press. Consumers Union said the public should have unrestricted access to data bank records, including the names of physicians with a history of harming patients.

The American Medical Association, however, took a different position. Posting the public-use file can mislead the public and may be illegal, AMA Executive Vice President and CEO James L. Madara, MD, wrote in a Sept. 23 letter to Wakefield.

Note: This item originally appeared at http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2011/12/05/prbf1205.htm.

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