Why you will have problems checking out your Georgia doctor
Fifteen years ago, Georgia lawmakers gave patients across the state the right to know whether their doctor had malpractice insurance coverage.
The legislation required that information be included on the profile of every licensed physician on the Georgia Composite Medical Board’s website, expanding on a law that allows patients to check on the credentials of the doctors they are seeing — or considering — for their care.
Only recently, though, after the board upgraded its website, did the malpractice insurance information start appearing on physician profiles instead of on a separate, hard-to-navigate document.
Yet now most of the information on malpractice coverage appears to be wrong.
Information on malpractice payouts, also required, often appears to be missing or inaccurate, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found.
Details on doctors’ board certifications also can be widely inaccurate. Other information required by Georgia’s 2001 Patient Right to Know Act, such as felony criminal convictions and restrictions on hospital privileges, is nowhere to be found.
Even the most critical part of the board’s disclosures — whether the medical board has disciplined a physician and for what — is not reliably reported, the AJC found.
At a time when federal health officials, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., advise Americans to do their own research as they face a bewildering assortment of claims about medical treatments, the errors and omissions leave patients with no reliable Georgia source of information to check the credentials of the doctors they entrust with their lives.
On its website, the board itself urges Georgians to be responsible when selecting a medical provider by reviewing information it provides, said Liz Coyle, the executive director of Georgia Watch, a non-profit consumer advocacy organization.
Risky Medicine
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“Obviously, that’s critically important, and yet, from your own reporting, consumers who go to the medical board to try to do their homework to make an informed decision, are encountering insufficient information and, in some cases, false information,” Coyle said.
Some of the issues were long-standing: A blistering state audit released in 2020 called out the board for failing to provide consumers with the required information in a useful format. Other problems came about as the medical board last summer switched to a new website.
Key takeaways
Georgia patients have a right to know their doctors’ qualifications and concerns, state lawmakers decided years ago. To that end, they passed a law requiring the information to be posted on the Georgia medical board’s website.
Yet much of the information is missing or wrong, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found. As a result, patients can’t rely on the details about malpractice payouts or coverage, doctors’ specialty certifications or their disciplinary history. What’s more, criminal convictions and restrictions on doctors’ hospital privileges are nowhere to be found, despite state law requiring the information be publicly available.
The medical board’s executive director says he wants to make it right, and it’s one of many issues he is struggling with as patients face the difficulty of doing their own research on a bewildering assortments of claims about medical treatments.
The switch has improved the efficiency of the licensing and renewal process, with the average time to issue a physician’s license dropping from about five months to less than two months. But the transition is continuing to create problems with profile information, the board’s leadership acknowledged.
“We want to make this right, and we want to get it right for you all and the public …,” Jason Jones, the board’s executive director, told the AJC. “It’s just going to take us a little bit longer.”
Important role
Under the Patient Right to Know Act, physician profiles are required to provide the public with comprehensive information about each doctor related to licensing, medical school attendance, graduate medical education and specialty board certification. The law also requires information about hospital privileges, the location of the practice and whether the doctor participates in Medicaid.
The law says the profiles must include information on any disciplinary actions or criminal convictions for felonies and report if a doctor loses hospital privileges.
State law also requires that medical malpractice settlements or court judgments be listed if the amounts reach certain thresholds.
Doctors are required to self-report much of the information.
To check the accuracy of profile information, the AJC checked key details on dozens of doctors. That review found information about physician specialties was flawed.
In numerous cases, profiles showed that doctors were not certified in their specialties, but the American Board of Medical Specialties showed that they were.
Some physicians were listed as having had no public disciplinary orders, but orders are posted on their profile. In other cases, no disciplinary orders were posted for physicians shown to have been sanctioned.
To check information on malpractice payouts, the AJC compared some listed information with findings from court cases and news reports. That review found examples where payout information was missing or inaccurate on the website.
The profile information is vital, according to experts.
“One of the most important roles state medical boards play is serving as a repository of publicly available information about physicians,” the Federation of State Medical Boards, an advocacy organization for state boards, says on its website.
Jones, the Georgia medical board’s executive director since 2024, said he wants to make sure that all the information that is supposed to be on board profiles is added. He acknowledged that things may have been missed in the transition to the new website and that there were issues with having accurate information available to include on each physician’s profile.
“We have some things to improve on,” Jones said. “We’re trying every day …”
“The public should be aware of this stuff, and if we’re supposed to provide that, we should make it accessible. And if we can’t make it accessible, why not?” he said. “… We need to find a way to do it.”
About this investigation
Who’s watching out for patients in Georgia?
That was a driving question as reporters Carrie Teegardin and Danny Robbins set out to examine how the state was responding to practitioners touting unproven and disproven health treatments.
An initial step was to assess the extent of alternative medicine and “wellness” clinics across Georgia and learn who practices at them, what treatments they offer and what claims they make. Using web searches and public records, data analyst Phoebe Quinton compiled information on hundreds of such businesses.
The reporting team, led by editor Lois Norder, then researched the qualifications of the nearly 300 practitioners identified at the clinics, storefronts and mobile services. Was the provider really board certified? A bestselling author? A world-renowned cancer expert? Was the person pictured in the white coat and called “doctor” really a licensed physician?
That laid the groundwork for the next step: learning more about Georgia’s oversight of those businesses.
For that, the AJC relied on databases it created for all orders issued by the Georgia Composite Medical Board since 2018, malpractice verdicts and federal actions against doctors. The team also reviewed minutes of medical board meetings, medical licensing laws and board financial information.
That work raised the question of whether other states do more to protect patients and how they regulate alternative medicine. So the team studied medical practice laws in other states, actions by their medical boards involving alternative medicine and board orders for substandard care.
To gain a national assessment of medical board oversight, Quinton used the public file of the National Practitioner Data Bank to see how often the Georgia medical board imposed serious discipline compared with other states and how often the board imposed discipline of any kind on physicians with malpractice payouts.
Some of the most painstaking work involved the individual alternative medicine businesses highlighted in the series. The reporters relied not only on court and business records but also interviews with patients they identified, clinic owners and operators and public officials.