Virginia gears up for Internet database on state's doctors

The state's road to posting physician profile information on the Web has been a rocky one.

By Damon Adams, amednews staff. May 28, 2001.

Sometime this summer, Virginia will join several other states in posting data about its physicians on the Internet. Disciplinary actions and malpractice claims will be among the information available to the public through the Web site.

Some of the state's 31,000 doctors have echoed concerns in other states about how patients will interpret malpractice details. But in Virginia, some physicians also have taken offense to a letter from the Virginia Board of Medicine, which is creating the database, telling them they may be subject to disciplinary action if they fail to provide the required material.

Links

"I have mixed feelings about it," said Cynthia C. Romero, MD, a family physician in Virginia Beach. "I believe patients should have access to information about their doctor. However, with malpractice, that puts information into the patients' hands that may not be as appropriate. There are varying degrees of legal actions; some of it is justified, or they may be unsubstantiated."

William Harp, MD, the board's executive director, acknowledged that some doctors didn't like his letter mentioning disciplinary consequences. But he said, "I wrote that as a service to my colleagues so they would be able to comply. I can assure you there was no intention to threaten anybody."

Other states offering a physician profiling system on the Web are Massachusetts, Tennessee and Florida.

In July 1998, Virginia passed a law requiring MDs and osteopathic physicians to report certain data to the state board, which would then make the information available to the public. Podiatrists also became subject to the law, and regulations to implement it were finalized last year. In March, the board mailed letters to the 30,803 MDs, DOs and podiatrists licensed in the state.

"We knew that this is something some physicians are comfortable with and some are not," said Mike Jurgensen, director of health policy for the Medical Society of Virginia. "There was concern about [malpractice details], and there remain concerns about that."

But some objections have faded because dollar amounts will not be given, Jurgensen said. Instead, the monetary value of awards against physicians will be listed as "average," "below average," or "above average" in relationship to other claims in the same specialty. And physicians will have an opportunity to "explain their side of the story on the questionnaire," said Randolph Gould, MD, medical society president.

Kate Nosbisch, Virginia board deputy executive director for practitioner information, said the database can serve as a marketing tool for a doctor's practice. "Some physicians like the idea, especially from the advertising angle," she said.

Board officials hope to have the database available in June. But the project has had problems. Hundreds of letters were returned because licensees moved and their mail could not be forwarded. Some doctors had a hard time reaching a phone help line, and Virginia Health Information, the project's vendor, was forced to increase its phone capacity.