By Duff Wilson
Health
But the return of the information came with a catch. It has a new requirement that anyone who uses it must first promise not to link information in the database with publicly available information, like court files, that would identify individual doctors.
And that was exactly the way journalists for many news organizations had used the national data bank, which masked individual doctors’ names, as material for articles about weaknesses in the oversight of doctors with dozens of malpractice cases and gaps in disciplinary actions.
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But journalists and other researchers have linked specific malpractice payments in court cases with the specific amounts reported in the Public Use file to fairly easily crack the code, add up cases against doctors, and report the results.
Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe, director of health research at the Washington nonprofit group Public Citizen, said it was “obnoxious” and “unacceptable” for the administration to impose the condition on journalists and researchers.
The entire story can be read here.
A prior blog entry on this issue can be found here.
