Senator Protests Agency Decision to Remove Doctor Data Online

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Senator Charles E. Grassley on Friday joined with dozens of academic researchers, consumer groups and journalism organizations who have protested an Obama administration decision to pull off the Web a database of doctor malpractice and disciplinary cases.In a strongly worded letter, the Iowa Republican, who has led investigations of fraud and waste in government health programs, said the now-removed file "serves as the backbone in providing transparency for bad-acting health care professionals." Senator Grassley asked the Health Resources and Services Administration of the Department of Health and Human Services to provide an in-depth briefing, answer questions and release internal documents by Oct. 21.The National Practitioner Data Bank was created in 1986 for hospitals, medical boards, insurers and others to share information so that bad doctors do not slip through cracks in reporting. Its Public Use File was established <a href="http://zhengxing.99mr.com/xiagejiaofeida/"><strong>下颌角瘦脸</strong></a> for researchers and journalists. The doctors’ identities, confidential by law, are replaced by numbers.But some journalists were able to identify the doctors based on information from court files and other sources. After a complaint by one doctor identified by The Kansas City Star, the agency threatened the newspaper reporter with a fine, pulled the doctor’s file from its Web site on Sept. 1 and began a review of how to hide the identities better. Its actions provoked protests.Senator Grassley demanded to know how that squared with a law requiring the <a href="http://zhengxing.99mr.com/meibuzhengxing/"><strong>小切口提眉</strong></a> data bank to be public as long as it did not identify individual doctors."It was only by comparing the data to other publicly available records that the reporter was able to get the story," he wrote. Other journalists and the nonprofit group Public Citizen have used the data to report on trends in medical disciplinary actions and loopholes at state medical boards, he said."It seems disturbing and bizarre that H.R.S.A. would attempt to chill a reporter's First Amendment activity with threats of fines for merely ‘republishing' public information from one source and connecting it with public information from another," Senator Grassley added.Martin A. Kramer, a spokesman for the agency, said it had received the senator's letter and had no further comment.Mary K. Wakefield, administrator of the agency, recently wrote to Charles Silver, a Harvard law professor, to say that she was "compelled to act" after learning the public use file could be "manipulated to identify individual practitioners.""This statement <a href="http://zhengxing.99mr.com/jurusuoxiaoshu/"><strong>巨乳缩小术</strong></a> is incorrect," six national journalism groups wrote in a Sept. 27 letter to Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of health and human services. "Nothing in the Public Use File can be used to identify individuals if reporters or researchers don't already know for whom they are searching. In fact, reporters spend weeks, sometimes months, researching the backgrounds of doctors, interviewing colleagues, reading court records and requesting discipline documents from numerous states."The journalism groups' response cited examples in Kansas City; St. Louis; Duluth, Minn.; Raleigh, N.C.; and Norfolk, Va., where reporters used the public use file to reveal problems in the system. The letter included individual reporters' statements about how they did their investigations.The public data file is currently available for free downloading on the Web site of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a journalists' training group, although that file will be more and more out-of-date as the dispute goes on.A retired former agency official, Robert E. Oshel, sided with the journalists and researchers. The agency is misinterpreting the law, according to an Oct. 2 statement from Mr. Oshel, associate director for research and disputes in the Division of Practitioner Data Banks from 1997 to 2008. The statement was released by the Association of Health Care Journalists.Mr. Oshel wrote: “H.R.S.A.’s current management seems to confuse the law's requirement that a public data file not permit use of its <a href="http://inbookmark.com/mybookmark.php"><strong>双眼皮</strong></a> records to identify individual practitioners with a very different requirement, and one not in the law: that the file not allow the records of previously identified practitioners to be identified in the file.”Mr. Oshel has worked with journalists, the nonprofit group Public Citizen and others to understand and use the public use data.Twenty-three academic researchers also protested the decision in a letter dated Sept. 22. By removing the file at the request of a physician with 16 malpractice claims, the researchers wrote, the government "took a large step in the direction of the ‘bad old days' when secrecy prevailed and providers' interests took precedence over patients' safety and well-being."