The National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) was formed in 1986 with passage of Title IV of the Health Care Quality Improvement Act. The creation of the databank was driven in part by concern that physicians, who had been disciplined by licensing boards or sued for malpractice in one state, were moving to other states to set up their practices without disclosing these adverse events to the new hospital credentialing committees or state licensing boards.1
Beginning in 1990, the NPDB started collecting information about medical malpractice payments, adverse actions by professional societies, and negative actions impacting medical licenses and clinical privileges. In 1997, pursuant to a federal interagency agreement, the NPDB started adding data about practitioners who had been excluded from Medicare and Medicaid. Section 1921 of the Social Security Act, passed in 1987 but not implemented until 2010, further authorized the NPDB to collect information from state licensing boards...
