[HN Gopher] Show HN: Explore Doctors' Disciplinary History
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Show HN: Explore Doctors' Disciplinary History
Author : jamesfly
Score : 106 points
Date : 2023-10-09 11:28 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.physician.fyi)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.physician.fyi)
| i4i wrote:
| I may be missing something, but I would like to be able to search
| by zip and return individual doctor's names.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| https://www.physician.fyi/ca/c%2042520 shows up on the map as
| being in some random village in France.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| I just read one of these via your site at random. Holy crap, talk
| about incompetence!
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/0/https://www2.mbc.ca.gov/PDL/do...
| jamesfly wrote:
| It never ceases to astound me, especially since these are the
| most well regarded members of our society with more education
| than anyone else.
|
| On another note, there are some really interesting ones like
| this one [1] starting on page 9 which reads like crime novel.
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230926165052/https://www2.mbc....
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Here's a quote from one I randomly clicked on:
|
| >Respondent admits that there were billings for 35 treatments
| apiece for two undercover law enforcement officers when each
| had only five visits. Further, he acknowledged that had he
| known the true facts, he would have investigated further.
| However, had he been vigilant, respondent does not believe that
| he would have detected the problem because patient signatures,
| as evidence that the patient received treatment, were forged
| after he issued his reports.
|
| I didn't realize that undercover agents were/are doing sting
| operations for insurance fraud. (And I don't understand the
| part about forged signatures...)
| jamesfly wrote:
| I've read some others with undercover agents when federal
| money is involved in the care like the patient using Medicaid
| and the doctor repeatedly uses that as a ticket for billing
| unnecessary services.
| qwertox wrote:
| I also partially read a random one [0], about a doctor who had
| his license revoked for 3 years. Tearing a patient's nerve
| because he lost a tool and other worse cases (page 17)
|
| [0]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230925064351/https://www2.mbc....
| mbostleman wrote:
| Thank you for this. The medical industry is in dire need of
| transparency. Next up would be pricing and costs!
| cobertos wrote:
| There is movement on the price/cost front. I found one tool
| that provides this data in a more searchable way
| (turquoise.health) and used it with limited success. I believe
| the upstream data is public as well, but cant remember the name
| of the repository OTOH.
| qwertox wrote:
| Absolutely incredible. I wish something like this existed for
| Germany.
| pierat wrote:
| Note: California ONLY.
|
| (commment: pity all states don't publish this in machine-readable
| formats. Id say this is more important than the monthly food
| report in the nnewspaper.)
| cobertos wrote:
| From the other comments it doesn't look like the data source is
| machine readable. It looks like there's automated OCR of PDFs.
| A similar project was doing the same but with human labor
| bloopernova wrote:
| Fantastic idea, thank you for implementing this.
|
| I too was harmed by a doctor and I'd really like to see this
| cover all states in the USA. I signed the linked petition on
| change.org.
| sickofparadox wrote:
| This is a fantastic tool, I have no doubt that it could help de-
| obfuscate the misconduct side of medicine, which most people have
| no idea even exists. Thank you for working on this!
| born2discover wrote:
| That's a really interesting project !
|
| One pet peeve, though. Some entries have "Arbitration Award"
| listed as an action. However, these usually mean that the
| physician won an arbitration case (i.e. the ruling was in their
| favour). Listing them without any differentiation can potentially
| negatively bias a person's opinion against a perfectly honest
| doctor.
| bee_rider wrote:
| This may be a character flaw on my part, but I'd be a little
| bit worried or at least curious about a doctor who's had a lot
| of arbitration cases relative to their career length, even if
| they've won them.
| sdossick wrote:
| Depending on the specialty of the doctor, they will get
| pulled into more or fewer malpractice cases. Obstetricians vs
| Dermatologists for instance.
|
| So you might want to examine a doctor's record vs the median
| for that kind of doctor...
| jamesfly wrote:
| Thank you. Here [1] is the source for one, which states "An
| arbitration award is a payment for damages and does not
| necessarily reflect that the physician's medical competence is
| below the standard of care. The Medical Board reviews all such
| reported arbitration awards and action is taken only if it is
| determined that a violation of the Medical Practice Act
| occurred. The Medical Board is prohibited by law from releasing
| a copy of the arbitration award report or any other information
| concerning the award." I am still unsure if that means the
| award was in the doctor's or patient's favor, and because the
| report is secret, it may not be possible to find out, but
| please let me know if you know how I could find out.
|
| I also want to mention that patients are forced into
| arbitration via the contract for service they initially sign
| [2] that many don't read (whether due their inability to
| understand it or time constraints on needing immediate care and
| limited availability of doctors). However, I think it's a shady
| practice that hurts patients [3] and it would be worth keeping
| the data showing doctors taking advantage of it regardless. The
| main excerpt from the article supporting it is "Doctors'
| attorneys are more likely to develop relationships with the
| arbitrators, they say, who, in turn, may give the plaintiff
| only a token award to get continued business from doctors."
|
| [1]
| https://search.dca.ca.gov/details/8002/G/77959/9df8d122bd5b5...
| [2] https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2007/ccp/1295.html
| [3] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
| xpm-2000-apr-24-he-22804...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Two bug reports:
|
| 1. When I search by "Malpractice Settlements", I get a "Minified
| React error #31" on every result I click on.
|
| 2. You're doing something horrible with the back button - I
| clicked on one result and had to click the back button 10 times
| to get out of your site.
| siva7 wrote:
| Thank you! This is such a useful site! Probably only possible in
| US since any other country restricts access to such records only
| for law enforcement which is a shame.
| omarfarooq wrote:
| Excellent, thank you for creating this. Just learning that this
| data is available. Only California? Are the other states not
| making the data available in the same fashion as CA?
|
| Also, was there a personal trigger for you to create this?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| In Washington, this information can be gleaned on a small scale
| from the Department of Health's Provider Credential Search -
| https://doh.wa.gov/licenses-permits-and-certificates/provide...
|
| And the higher volume Open Data Portal dataset:
| https://data.wa.gov/Health/Health-Care-Provider-Credential-D...
| jamesfly wrote:
| Thank you. This data should be available in all states, but
| each state has a proprietary site I have to write a new scraper
| for and write a new data pipeline for. I'm thinking about open-
| sourcing the project and gathering community support for the
| rest now that I have a good pattern set.
|
| Yes, I was harmed by a doctor and the medical board dismissed
| my complaint. This made me curious about what the board
| actually does take action for, but this wasn't searchable
| because all that was available were PDF scans that weren't
| digitized/OCR'd. I also noticed some documents that were
| referenced in doctors' profiles had disappeared. As part of
| this, I archived every PDF available on the wayback machine to
| protect against that going forward.
|
| I also want to give credit to a similar site that I took
| inspiration from called 4patientsafety.org, which did some of
| the same stuff I have here, but completely manually. I chatted
| with the creator of that and he agreed making an automated
| version would help because they fell behind updating it due to
| how intensive the manual process was.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I'm also interested in writing a scraper for my site
| (Michigan) if time allows.
| noman-land wrote:
| Please open source this. I would love to help.
| codeTired wrote:
| I'm interested in helping out.
|
| I have done a lot of research in medicine due to my poor
| experiences with even top specialists. Ignoring symptoms,
| denying side effects of meds I took, even though those were
| present on the label.
|
| Do you have a discord?
|
| Any plans on allowing people to comment on physicians?
|
| Any plans of adding how much doctors have received from
| corporate interests?(as this data is available)
| cobertos wrote:
| Is there a link to the community where this is being
| developed? I was unable to find one on the site itself. I'd
| be interested in writing a scraper for my state and the
| digitization pipeline.
| the_sleaze9 wrote:
| I'd be interested in helping out as well, looking forward
| to it
| heliostatic wrote:
| You may want to look at courtlistener.org as inspiration--
| similar set of problems, but in a different space obviously.
| yorwba wrote:
| > I archived every PDF available on the wayback machine
|
| How did you tell archive.org to store the PDFs? It doesn't
| seem to have worked in all cases, since when I went to check
| out the single "order vacating automatic cancellation of
| certificate", there was no snapshot yet.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20231009140931/https://www2.mbc..
| ..
| sicromoft wrote:
| This is great to see. Some feedback: I entered the exact name of
| a doctor I knew would be in the database, formatted as "firstName
| lastName". The result was buried under 20 other less relevant
| matches. I had to search as "lastName, firstName", for it to come
| back as the first result.
| briffle wrote:
| I noticed when zooming in on the map, the light blue color is
| almost identical to what the map shows as lakes/ponds/water
| etc.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Very nice data! Interesting when paired with (also front page)
| 'The Prosecutor's Fallacy'
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37819637
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(page generated 2023-10-09 23:02 UTC)