The NCMB has established a new program to ensure complete and accurate reporting and publication of certain licensee information, including details about convictions, certain malpractice payments and disciplinary actions by health care regulatory authorities.
A state law that took effect October 1, 2007, directs the Board to collect from licensees and publish information in 13 required categories. Last fall, the Board built an online portal at its website,
www.ncmedboard.org, and mailed letters requesting that its physician and physician assistant licensees use the system to provide their information. The response rate to the Board’s notices about the Licensee Information (LI) project was about 90 percent.
To ensure full compliance with the law, Board staff systematically review certain required data reported via the LI portal, identify errors or omissions and make changes to the published reports where needed. Licensees are notified and invited to review changes when their information is revised. Categories of information that are reviewed include: healthcare agency actions, hospital suspensions/revocations, malpractice payments, misdemeanor convictions and felony convictions.
The new compliance program’s priorities include: reviewing existing reports of required information to verify accuracy and completeness; proactively identifying licensees with new, unreported required information to ensure that the Board is appropriately notified and a public report ompleted; and reaching out to licensees who by law are subject to inclusion in the Board’s LI pages but have not yet responded to Board requests to update their information. In future, the Board intends to begin general compliance audits to verify the accuracy of certain reported information, including current practice address, postgraduate training and board certifications, if any.
While the Board is authorized to discipline licensees who fail to report required information, or who provide false information, the Board’s primary concern is with compliance. To date, the Board has not disciplined a licensee due to problems with his or her LI page.
