National Practitioner Data Bank Research Articles

From the Office of the General Counsel. Reports to the National Practitioner Data Bank

From the Office of the General Counsel. Reports to the National Practitioner Data Bank

National practitioner data bank

EDITOR'S NOTE: As more and more CNMs expand the scope of their practice to include well woman care, the potential for litigation increases. It, thus, behooves the practicing CNM to become familiar with the National Practitioner Data Bank, which is discussed in the following paper.

National Practitioner Data Bank: implications for hospital administrators and care review professionals.

National Practitioner Data Bank: implications for hospital administrators and care review professionals.

The Health Care Quality Improvement Act of 1986: Its History, Provisions, Applications and Implications

Congress granted qualified immunity from liability for peer review participation to physicians, osteopaths and dentists, created a national practitioner data bank to track inept, incompetent or unprofessional physicians, and enacted procedural rules for due process, privilege restrictions, and reporting and disbursement of information. The Health Care Quality Improvement Act of 1986 is now in full force, and peer review participants are anxious to cloak themselves with immunity from actions brought by health care professionals. Although its goals are worthy, HCQIA's effects remain to be seen. Serious loopholes appear to exist, warranting close monitoring and possibly early amendment of the Act. Cautious judicial assessment is needed, in order to prevent not only circumvention of the Act's requirements by artful litigants, but also use of the national data bank by health care entities as a pretext for denying privileges and escaping antitrust liability.

The Rational Litigant: Settlement Amounts and Verdict Rates in Japan

IN comparative work on Japanese law, "culture" is king. That culture matters is clear enough. Even in the West, essays about relentlessly rational individuals, divorced from their cultural context, do seem to miss the color and richness of human experience.' How much more so in Japan, where some writers routinely describe "[n]on-rational" and "nonlogical tendencies" as among "the main features of the Japanese ways of thinking."2 Applying rational models in the Japanese setting thus justifiably strikes many observers as a perversely myopic exercise. From such a culturalist perspective, the exercise resembles nothing so much as Verdi's dismissal of Mozart as "un quartettista," or even Toscanini's