Courts set limits on confidentiality in disciplinary actions

An Iowa case is the latest to head to a state supreme court.

By Amy Lynn Sorrel, AMNews staff. Feb. 20, 2006.

Several state medical boards have found themselves tangled in recent legal battles to determine how much information should be disclosed when going public about misconduct charges against a doctor.

In Iowa, a physician and state regulators are headed to the state Supreme Court to answer that question. The South Carolina Supreme Court settled a dispute last year. And although there's been no lawsuit filed, a debate has ensued in Mississippi over a recently released medical board policy.

The medical community says these are difficult queries, because there is often a fine line between doctors receiving due process and patients receiving credible information.

The problem for doctors is "if charges made are not accurate, reputations are harmed, because you are deemed guilty before due process," said attorney Michael Schaff, a health law specialist with Wilentz, Goldman & Spitzer in New Jersey. Doctors don't dispute that the public has a right to know, he said, "but maybe not the complete details of the case."

American Medical Association policy supports providing accurate information to patients and acknowledges the merit of publicly reporting licensure revocations and reinstatements that are the result of due process and unbiased professional peer review.

Reporting unproven allegations "raises serious due process questions" and "can mislead the public and destroy the trust between patient and physician," said Duane M. Cady, MD, chair of the AMA Board of Trustees.