Utah Med Law

Not a lot of people are aware that there exists a national data bank that keeps track of incompetent and unprofessional health care practitioners.  The data bank is known as the National practitioner's Date Bank.  According to Tulsa World in their recent article titled "20 Years of Malpractice Data Still Mostly Closed to Public" the data base has information on some 460,000 medical malpractice lawsuits whose judgments total $69.7 billion.  The article also states that the data base includes information on 23,788 patient deaths, 8,100 major permanent injuries and 3,896 cases that resulted in quadriplegics, brain damage or lifelong care.

What is startling is that the greater amount of the information held in the data bank is not available to the public.  

Patients make decisions everyday about their health care every day.  To make the best decision possible people need to have all of the available facts.  If the surgeon you are considering cutting into your abdomen is a repating offender and been found liable in repeated medical malpractice cases do you think that information would be critical in your decision process?

There are many reasons advanced by the American Medical Association about why the information needs to be kept secret.  The primary reason is that they claim the information in the data base is inaccurate.  Better some information than no information at all I say.  

There is a paternalistic attitude in medicine that permeates almost all aspects of care.  There is this attitude that somehow patients can not be trusted to make decisions about their own health.  In this day of information consumers of health care are becoming sophisticated buyers and need the information on which to base those decisions.  

Furthermore, most physicians believe that a relatively small number of thier profession account for the vast amount of medical negligence.  If that is the case then teh AMA is missing the mark in policing their own profession.  

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