Consumer advocacy group Public Citizen is calling on HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to address concerns that hospitals are not submitting reports to the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) when they revoke or restrict physicians' admitting privileges. In its report, Hospitals Drop the Ball on Physician Oversight, and letter to Sebelius, the advocacy group charges that nearly half of hospitals have never filed a NPDB report in 17 years, despite estimates by HHS that 5,000 hospital clinical privilege reports would be submitted to the NPDB each year. The average number of hospital reports per year has been 650.
The report claims that the lack of reporting by hospitals is due to lax hospital peer review and the use of loopholes to avoid the reporting requirement. Public Citizen is asking Sebelius to follow through on recommendations made by the Office of Inspector General in 1996 to stop NPDB under-reporting, such as fining hospitals each time they fail to make a report and making NPDB reporting a condition of participating in Medicare.
