Malpractice data from the National Practitioner Data Bank

The National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) is a computer depository of healthcare providers' malpractice payments by insurers and adverse actions by licensing boards, hospitals or professional societies accumulated since September 1, 1990. The NPDB provides a resource for health care entities to query before hiring healthcare providers with the hope of identifying possible incompetent practitioners. The statistics isolating physician and nursing malpractice payment used in this article were obtained from Senator Inouye who requested their compilation from the Department of Health and Human Services. An examination of the NPDB malpractice payment reports to 1993 for Registered Nurses (RN), Advanced Practice Nurses (APN), and physicians shows that RNs and APNs are reported much less frequently than physicians. This article presents the raw and rate data, discusses accuracy of the data, and presents implications for APNs.