npdb function

National Practioner Data Bank

Selected variables from the publicly available data from the National Practioner Data Bank (NPDB). data

data(npdb)

Format

A data frame with 6797 observations on the following 6 variables.

• state: 2 digit abbreviation of state
• field: Field of practice
• age: Age of practictioner (rounded down to 10s digit)
• year: Year of claim
• amount: Dollar amount of reward
• ID: a practioner ID, masked for anonymity

The variable names do not match the original. The codings for field come from a document on http://63.240.212.200/publicdata.html.

Details

This dataset excerpts some interesting variables from the NPDB for the years 2000-2003. The question of capping medical malpractice awards to lower insurance costs is currently being debated nationwide (U.S.). This data is a primary source for determining this debate.

A quotation from https://npdb-hipdb.com/:

The legislation that led to the creation of the NPDB was enacted theU.S. Congress believed that the increasing occurrence of medicalmalpractice litigation and the need to improve the quality of medicalcare had become nationwide problems that warranted greater efforts thanany individual State could undertake. The intent is to improve thequality of health care by encouraging State licensing boards, hospitalsand other health care entities, and professional societies to identifyand discipline those who engage in unprofessional behavior; and torestrict the ability of incompetent physicians, dentists, and otherhealth care practitioners to move from State to State withoutdisclosure or discovery of previous medical malpractice payment andadverse action history. Adverse actions can involve licensure, clinicalprivileges, professional society membership, and exclusions fromMedicare and Medicaid.

Source

This data came from https://npdb-hipdb.com/

Examples

data(npdb)
table(table(npdb$ID))           # big offenders
hist(log(npdb$amount))          # log normal?