Trends in Querying and Reporting to the National Practitioner Data Bank and the Healthcare Integrity Protection Data Bank

Promoting and maintaining healthy communities are inextricably linked to well-grounded public health infrastructures. A highly competent healthcare practitioner workforce is pivotal to these infrastructures and is necessary to assure favorable public health outcomes. The National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) and the Healthcare Integrity and Protection Data Bank (HIPDB) (collectively referred to as the Data Bank) are integral to shaping the quality of the healthcare practitioner workforce by alerting healthcare entities about practitioners who have had adverse clinical privilege or licensing actions taken against them. Adverse actions are based on practitioner incompetence and misconduct. Malpractice payments made on behalf of patients are also included in the Data Bank. The Data Bank serves as an information clearinghouse or flagging system for entities to identify practitioners who may attempt to practice across state boundaries without disclosing their previous adverse history. Over eighteen thousand entities (i.e., medical and dental boards, federal and government agencies, health plans, hospitals, state licensing boards, peer review organizations) have active reporting and/or querying privileges with the Data Bank. The overarching purpose of this paper is to explore how the Data Bank contributes to a higher quality public healthcare practitioner workforce. To do so, the characteristics of the entities that have queried and submitted reports on practitioners to the Data Bank are described. Trends in report revisions and corrections over the past decade are also examined. Both will offer insights into the administrative aspects of receiving complete and accurate data from entities in the midst of changing legislative reporting requirements.