National Practitioner Data Bank

And then what we have beyond surveys is claims data from individual insurance companies, and thank goodness they are willing to share it.

And we have the National Practitioner Data Bank, which captures only cases where a payment was made.

And all of these are valuable, but none give us the full picture that any one person in any specific kind of practice model practicing a specific specialty in a specific county of a specific state, we don't have access to that.

We don't really have a comprehensive, publicly accessible way to look at court records, state by state, county by county, specialty by specialty, and ask how many physicians were named this year? How many physicians per claim? How often do these cases result in a payment for how much? What are the concentrations? That infrastructure just does not exist yet.

And then there's claims data, which I'm presuming is from the doctor's company.

Maybe you can clarify for me.

And then payments to the National Practitioner Data Bank.

Am I right? Can you tell me a little bit about the data collection?

If a hospital reports an adverse action, who confirms receipt? That's the question.

Who tracks it? Who checks whether the state board, the NPDB, the payer, and other facilities have the information they are legally literally entitled to receive? Who makes sure such a giant document dump does not become a digital graveyard?

No, you're absolutely right, and guys, if you do not...

I'm sorry.

Yeah.

And I think hospitals a lot of time don't wanna go to battle with the doctors, and so a lot of them will just kind of move it, move it along, move it along.

And this is really [clears throat] an example, a beautiful example, of a doc- of a hospital organization saying, "We are gonna protect our patients from this pr- provider, and it doesn't matter if the provider wants to battle us," because the state board said that he was being dangerous, and really truly backed up the hospital.

I mean, this story is the Montana tea, but the lesson is national and for hospitals everywhere.

Well, and what they're hiding behind is that when you submit your credentialing paperwork to an insurance company, they run your...

NPDB, whatever report, you have to submit all this stuff to them.

But you have to do the same thing when you get your malpractice insurance.

So it's not like you're insured.