Utah offers patients little information on physicians

When it comes to alerting patients about doctors who misbehave, Utah does OK — but can't hold a candle to states like Arizona, California, Florida, New York and Massachusetts, whose medical boards have detailed, patient-friendly Web sites.

Patients in these states can go online to get a list of all practicing doctors, with information about certifications and education, criminal convictions, and how many malpractice suits against the doctor resulted in payment. If a doctor has been disciplined, it's possible to pull up details of the case online, for free. And some go beyond that. Arizona tells of ongoing investigations. California shows hospital termination of privilege, for example.

Utah offers none of this information online — and some of it is not available at all. The information on Utah's Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing Web site is bare-bones, although a group that grades online information gives it a "B."

According to DOPL public information officer Clark Caras, software and manpower limitations have kept some of the information from DOPL's Web site. He says Commerce Department head Russ Skousen's goal is to make the site more user-friendly as funding for software becomes more available. However, ongoing investigations would never be listed, he says, because by statute these are confidential in Utah, and malpractice payment history would probably not be included because it costs too much to access that information from the National Practitioner Data Bank, he says.

As physicians groups are demanding liability reform, patients are responding with demands of their own, including more information about quality of medical care. For instance, Florida voters passed an initiative last November giving patients the right to review, upon request, the records of all adverse medical incidents at hospitals, including the names of doctors involved. An Illinois proposal calls for revoking a health-care professional's license for three or more "gross negligence" violations.

Massachusetts requires that hospitals report all medical errors to the state medical board; if a doctor might have caused the error, that may trigger board scrutiny. Conversely, while the Utah Department of Health collects information on all adverse medical events, doctors and hospitals remain anonymous as part of the enticement to report, rather than hide, errors.