8 ms·
Show HN: Explore doctors' disciplinary history
- sickofparadox 3y agoThis is a fantastic tool, I have no doubt that it could help de-obfuscate the misconduct side of medicine, which most people have no idea even exists. Thank you for working on this!
- jamesfly 3y agoThank you! I too had no idea it existed before it happened to me.
- qwertox 3y agoAbsolutely incredible. I wish something like this existed for Germany.
- mywrathacademia 3y agoWith all the data protection laws doctors over there use as a shield, would it even be possible?
- jamesfly 3y agoSomething patient-initiated should always be possible. Already patients take to Yelp and Google Maps to leave reviews, but they are often taken down by the doctor/business. I've enabled comments on doctors' profiles as a first step toward this, but you make me think I could improve it by allowing submission of new doctors worldwide.
- omarfarooq 3y agoExcellent, thank you for creating this. Just learning that this data is available. Only California? Are the other states not making the data available in the same fashion as CA? Also, was there a personal trigger for you to create this?
- jamesfly 3y agoThank you. This data should be available in all states, but each state has a proprietary site I have to write a new scraper for and write a new data pipeline for. I'm thinking about open-sourcing the project and gathering community support for the rest now that I have a good pattern set. Yes, I was harmed by a doctor and the medical board dismissed my complaint. This made me curious about what the board actually does take action for, but this wasn't searchable because all that was available were PDF scans that weren't digitized/OCR'd. I also noticed some documents that were referenced in doctors' profiles had disappeared. As part of this, I archived every PDF available on the wayback machine to protect against that going forward. I also want to give credit to a similar site that I took inspiration from called 4patientsafety.org, which did some of the same stuff I have here, but completely manually. I chatted with the creator of that and he agreed making an automated version would help because they fell behind updating it due to how intensive the manual process was.
- cobertos 3y agoIs there a link to the community where this is being developed? I was unable to find one on the site itself. I'd be interested in writing a scraper for my state and the digitization pipeline.
- the_sleaze9 3y agoI'd be interested in helping out as well, looking forward to it
- jamesfly 3y agoThank you. I'm going to refine the site and data a little more over the next week and maybe do a second state myself to make sure my pattern generalizes well before opening up the repo, but I've now made a discord https://discord.gg/bXdk4CuR7B https://discord.gg/bXdk4CuR7B for anyone interested in contributing.
- jamesfly 3y ago
- unsupp0rted 3y agoI just read one of these via your site at random. Holy crap, talk about incompetence! https://web.archive.org/web/0/https://www2.mbc.ca.gov/PDL/document.aspx?path=%5cDIDOCS%5c20220301%5cDMRAAAJD1%5c&did=AAAJD220301233526963.DID https://web.archive.org/web/0/https://www2.mbc.ca.gov/PDL/do...
- P_I_Staker 3y agoIt's not just incompetence. Many of these people also abuse their patients. They know what they're doing. They know they have all the power.
- jamesfly 3y agoIt never ceases to astound me, especially since these are the most well regarded members of our society with more education than anyone else. On another note, there are some really interesting ones like this one [1] starting on page 9 which reads like crime novel. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230926165052/https://www2.mbc.ca.gov/PDL/document.aspx?path=%5CDIDOCS%5C20030107%5CDMRA2%5C&did=A1GAR5SS.DID https://web.archive.org/web/20230926165052/https://www2.mbc....
- qwertox 3y agoI also partially read a random one [0], about a doctor who had his license revoked for 3 years. Tearing a patient's nerve because he lost a tool and other worse cases (page 17) [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230925064351/https://www2.mbc.ca.gov/PDL/document.aspx?path=%5CDIDOCS%5C20120910%5CDMRAAAEC1%5C&did=AAAEC120910221311325.DID https://web.archive.org/web/20230925064351/https://www2.mbc....
- anon84873628 3y agoHere's a quote from one I randomly clicked on: >Respondent admits that there were billings for 35 treatments apiece for two undercover law enforcement officers when each had only five visits. Further, he acknowledged that had he known the true facts, he would have investigated further. However, had he been vigilant, respondent does not believe that he would have detected the problem because patient signatures, as evidence that the patient received treatment, were forged after he issued his reports. I didn't realize that undercover agents were/are doing sting operations for insurance fraud. (And I don't understand the part about forged signatures...)
- bloopernova 3y agoFantastic idea, thank you for implementing this. I too was harmed by a doctor and I'd really like to see this cover all states in the USA. I signed the linked petition on change.org.
- jamesfly 3y agoSo sorry that happened to you too. Thank you for signing the petition—I hope that would obviate the need for this site altogether.
- born2discover 3y agoThat's a really interesting project ! One pet peeve, though. Some entries have "Arbitration Award" listed as an action. However, these usually mean that the physician won an arbitration case (i.e. the ruling was in their favour). Listing them without any differentiation can potentially negatively bias a person's opinion against a perfectly honest doctor.
- bee_rider 3y agoThis may be a character flaw on my part, but I’d be a little bit worried or at least curious about a doctor who’s had a lot of arbitration cases relative to their career length, even if they’ve won them.
- sdossick 3y agoDepending on the specialty of the doctor, they will get pulled into more or fewer malpractice cases. Obstetricians vs Dermatologists for instance. So you might want to examine a doctor's record vs the median for that kind of doctor...
- jamesfly 3y agoThank you. Here [1] is the source for one, which states "An arbitration award is a payment for damages and does not necessarily reflect that the physician's medical competence is below the standard of care. The Medical Board reviews all such reported arbitration awards and action is taken only if it is determined that a violation of the Medical Practice Act occurred. The Medical Board is prohibited by law from releasing a copy of the arbitration award report or any other information concerning the award." I am still unsure if that means the award was in the doctor's or patient's favor, and because the report is secret, it may not be possible to find out, but please let me know if you know how I could find out. I also want to mention that patients are forced into arbitration via the contract for service they initially sign [2] that many don't read (whether due their inability to understand it or time constraints on needing immediate care and limited availability of doctors). However, I think it's a shady practice that hurts patients [3] and it would be worth keeping the data showing doctors taking advantage of it regardless. The main excerpt from the article supporting my thoughts is "Doctors’ attorneys are more likely to develop relationships with the arbitrators, they say, who, in turn, may give the plaintiff only a token award to get continued business from doctors." [1] https://search.dca.ca.gov/details/8002/G/77959/9df8d122bd5b5bd995971e4eafb9efdb https://search.dca.ca.gov/details/8002/G/77959/9df8d122bd5b5... [2] https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2007/ccp/1295.html https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2007/ccp/1295.html [3] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-24-he-22804-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-apr-24-he-22804...
- 1970-01-01 3y agoVery nice data! Interesting when paired with (also front page) 'The Prosecutor's Fallacy' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37819637 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37819637
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoTwo bug reports: 1. When I search by "Malpractice Settlements", I get a "Minified React error #31" on every result I click on. 2. You're doing something horrible with the back button - I clicked on one result and had to click the back button 10 times to get out of your site.
- jamesfly 3y agoThank you. 1. Fixed 2. Do you think this is because the URL stores the filter params, so every time you change a filter it's a new address? Do you have any examples of similar sites and how they behave? I can change this if it's not standard.
- sicromoft 3y agoThis is great to see. Some feedback: I entered the exact name of a doctor I knew would be in the database, formatted as "firstName lastName". The result was buried under 20 other less relevant matches. I had to search as "lastName, firstName", for it to come back as the first result.
- briffle 3y agoI noticed when zooming in on the map, the light blue color is almost identical to what the map shows as lakes/ponds/water etc.
- jamesfly 3y agoThank you. I'll fix this. I'm working out dark mode for the map, so I'll do it along with that when I figure it out.
- jamesfly 3y agoThank you. I'll fix asap. The data source only gives me the names as complete names in "last, first middle" format, and I didn't want to take risk parsing them since there are inconsistencies, but I'll work it out. For now, I've clarified the format in the placeholder of that field.
- ryandrake 3y agoYea, a more exact search that can parse out first name and last name would be the way. If I search for JOHN SMITH, and there are actually none in the database, I think I'd rather just see no results than 50 different Johns, none with last name Smith.
- siva7 3y agoThank you! This is such a useful site! Probably only possible in US since any other country restricts access to such records only for law enforcement which is a shame.
- jamesfly 3y agoThank you. I agree that even though in the US this stuff is not as available as it could be, it still beats most of the world. That's why I think allowing for patients to report the information is so important. I've taken the first step toward that by enabling comments on each doctor's profile.
- i4i 3y agoI may be missing something, but I would like to be able to search by zip and return individual doctor's names.
- pierat 3y agoNote: California ONLY. (commment: pity all states don't publish this in machine-readable formats. Id say this is more important than the monthly food report in the nnewspaper.)
- cobertos 3y agoFrom the other comments it doesn't look like the data source is machine readable. It looks like there's automated OCR of PDFs. A similar project was doing the same but with human labor
- jamesfly 3y ago"—more states coming soon" ;) No state publishes this depth of data machine readable. u/cobertos covered the rest in their reply.
- mbostleman 3y agoThank you for this. The medical industry is in dire need of transparency. Next up would be pricing and costs!
- cobertos 3y agoThere is movement on the price/cost front. I found one tool that provides this data in a more searchable way (turquoise.health) and used it with limited success. I believe the upstream data is public as well, but cant remember the name of the repository OTOH.
- huhtenberg 3y agohttps://www.physician.fyi/ca/c%2042520 https://www.physician.fyi/ca/c%2042520 shows up on the map as being in some random village in France.
- jamesfly 3y agoI marked the map feature beta because I noticed the geocoding wasn't accurate for all addresses. I'll get on that. I'm hesitant to just exclude ones not in the US though because it's possible a doctor has a California license while primarily practicing in another country, just like that case.
- huhtenberg 3y agoIn that case I think it's a confusion over "Jerusalem" in her address and "Jerusalem" in the name of the tagged place, which is "Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Jerusalem".
- jamesfly 3y agoFixed thanks.
- 1270018080 3y agoThe text search could be better. Searching for an exact last name turned up a bunch of results don't match at all
- jamesfly 3y agoIt's fuzzy search, so the most relevant ones should be ordered correctly. I can certainly tune the threshold to not keep less relevant ones.
- LoganDark 3y ago*In California
- jamesfly 3y agoWe've got Florida now too!