Newspaper associations and public interest groups are protesting a move by the Obama administration to withhold a data bank created by Congress in 1986 to assist hospitals and state licensing boards to check doctor’s records for discipline and malpractice.
The records had been useful in creating laws to protect the public as reported by Blythe Bernhard and Jeremy Kohler in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.”The Post-Dispatch used the public file last year in an investigation of the lax and secret system of doctor discipline in Missouri. The investigation led to a new law that gives the state healing arts board more power and gives patients more information about their doctors,” they wrote.
From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 15, 2011, by Blythe Bernhard and Jeremy Kohler.