Health Professions

National Practitioner Data Bank

INTRODUCTION

The National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) program’s performance measures and activities build upon HRSA’s long-range goal to “Improve the Quality of Health Care” and are keyed to the following HRSA objective:

• Promote patient safety and improve patient protections

This program maintains a data base that identifies physicians and dentists who have malpractice judgments against them, sanctions from medical boards, or who have lost memberships in professional medical societies.  This database restricts the ability of physicians and dentists with poor practice records or who have exhibited unprofessional behavior from moving State-to-State without disclosing previous damaging or incompetent performance.  Potential employers will be able to make better hiring decisions that will provide for a better quality health workforce.

Performance measure information, some of which is updated monthly, is used by the program to assess the success of the Data Banks in meeting goals for querying and use of the information by queriers for decision making in individual licensing and credentialing cases.  Overall the information, which is assessed annually, is used to help determine the degree to which the program is meeting the needs of the queriers.  A strategy the Program uses is to regularly conduct surveys to assess the utility of its information to customers, customer satisfaction, and areas on which improvement efforts should be focused.

DISCUSSION OF RESULTS AND TARGETS

Long-Term Objective:  Promote patient safety and improve patient protections.

8.III.B.1.  Increase annually the use of the NPDB for licensing and credentialing decision-making, operationalized as the number of licensing and credentialing decisions which limit practitioner’s ability to practice because of information contained in NPDB reports.

In FY 2007, 47,200 licensing or credentialing decisions were impacted by information supplied by the NPDB.  This was an increase over the FY 2006 actual of 46,450 and exceeded the FY 2007 target by more than 3 percent.  Implementation of Section 1921of the SSA regulations will place most reports currently housed in the HIPDB into the NPDB.  This is expected to substantially increase use of NPDB over what is shown in the previous table.  At this time, it is uncertain when these regulations will be adopted.  Future targets will be adjusted as needed after Section 1921 regulations are adopted.  A target of 46,600 decisions has been set for FY 2009.

8.III.B.2.  Increase annually the number of times information provided by NPDB is considered useful by the querying entity which received it.

In 479,500 cases in FY 2007, the querying entity considered the information provided by NPDB to be useful.  This was an increase over the FY 2006 actual of 475,300 and exceeded the FY 2007 target by about 5 percent.   The FY 2009 target is 480,700 cases.
 
8.E.  Increase annually the number of queries for which NPDB and HIPDB responded within 240 minutes.

The length of time it takes the NPDB-HIPDB to process a query and return results to the querier has been reduced while both the number of queries and the number of reports in the system have continually increased.  When the NPDB opened in 1990, it took days to process queries.  The system has changed from paper documents to an internet-based system containing electronic documents.  Queries are now responded to within 240 minutes.  The volume of queries has increased greatly over the years, to over 4.7 million queries in FY 2007 that were responded to within 240 minutes.  The FY 2009 target is 4.9 million queries.