State health officials say it could take a few more months to finish adding missing disciplinary information to the online profiles of doctors who are licensed to practice in Connecticut.
The state launched a review in June after Connecticut Public reported some information about past discipline and felony charges was missing.
A staffer from the Department of Public Health told members of Connecticut’s Medical Examining Board on Tuesday that he aims to complete the work of updating all records of discipline received by doctors in other states by the end of this year.
Board Chairperson Kathryn Emmett said she’s grateful the problem is being addressed.
“The investigative report was helpful in that it brought a problem to light that is now being fixed. So that's good,” Emmett said. “It’s unfortunate it existed, but I'm glad it's in the process of being fixed.”
Connecticut Public searched licensing records from more than 20 states, and found doctors eligible to practice in Connecticut who had their licenses suspended or revoked, signed consent orders and received public reprimands in other jurisdictions.
Among them: a Tennessee physician charged with illegally prescribing medication; a Virginia doctor who gave expired drugs to patients; and a teleradiologist who misinterpreted a 68-year-old woman’s CT scan. She later died.
Some matters dated back more than four years. And in each case, Connecticut’s online records showed those doctors had never been disciplined elsewhere.
Omitting that disciplinary information leaves gaps for medical boards trying to assess each doctor’s professional history, experts said. It also hampers patients, who rely on official government records to make informed decisions about medical care.
After being contacted by Connecticut Public, DPH acknowledged it had failed to update some physician profiles. It said the task of automatically forwarding all out-of-state discipline reports to the unit that updates those records was “inadvertently lost in the mix of reassigning tasks following a series of staffing changes.”
“The Department has corrected that workflow issue so that going forward profiles will be updated in a timely fashion,” it said at the time. “At the same time, the Department is comparing past reports of out of state physician discipline with the information recorded in profiles and updating the information accordingly.”
Speaking at Tuesday’s board meeting, member Michele Jacklin said Connecticut Public’s reporting should raise concerns among state officials.
“That was kind of a damning story, and very well documented in June,” Jacklin said. “And I think that certainly should be a concern of ours about what's being done now to update the files and make sure that Connecticut residents can have faith that when they look up … the records of Connecticut physicians, that they are up to date.”
Stephen Carragher, a DPH staffer in the unit that manages the initial licensing of physicians and surgeons, said Connecticut conducts a series of checks to determine if an applicant for a new license to practice medicine has been disciplined previously. Those checks include querying records from the National Practitioner Data Bank and the Federation of State Medical Boards, two repositories of information collected from licensing officials across the country.
But that's not always foolproof. That's because many states don't release the fact that they have an open investigation pending against a licensed doctor, Carragher said. Officials in Connecticut don’t grant licenses to medical professionals with pending investigations until cases in other jurisdictions are resolved, Carragher said.
But officials here are often unaware of those pending investigations unless they’re disclosed by the applicant, he said. Doctors must self-report their disciplinary history when they first apply for a license, or when they renew that license each year. Under state law, doctors also must report any new sanctions within 60 days.
In its reporting earlier this year, Connecticut Public highlighted the case of a Florida doctor who was placed on probation under a settlement reached with Florida’s Department of Health in November 2022. Officials there had accused him of medical malpractice in a pair of cases, including one in which a patient died.
The doctor’s licensing records in Connecticut showed no record of that disciplinary history until after Connecticut Public posed questions about the missing information to the state.
The Medical Examining Board is now deciding whether to impose sanctions against that doctor in Connecticut, where he also holds a license.
When he first applied for the license in 2020, the doctor indicated on an electronic form he had no past discipline. But he should have disclosed he was facing an open case in Florida, a DPH representative previously told the board. The doctor also failed to disclose the allegations in Florida when he renewed his license in Connecticut in April 2022, according to DPH.
Laura Morris, another Connecticut DPH staffer, told board members on Tuesday that the state received notice of the doctor’s case in January 2023 from counterparts in Florida, and concluded their investigation into the matter in May.
“We may not receive all the information from all the states, especially when, you know, they're applying for licenses here in Connecticut,” she said, “but we do try our best to vet them out as best we can.”
Connecticut Public's Bria Lloyd and Kate Seltzer contributed to this report.
