Medical Boards: Better doctors, or less enforcement?

The number of disciplinary actions taken against doctors has dropped during the past two years, to 5,319 in 2007, according to the Federation of State Medical Boards. That's 255 fewer actions than were recorded in 2006, and nearly 900 less than in 2005. While the Federation notes that the purpose of its report is to track discipline trends within individual states and not make comparisons between them, that doesn't stop groups like Public Citizen from ranking states by the number of serious measures taken, such as license revocations and suspensions. (At press time, Public Citizen hadn't yet released a report based on the FSMB's 2007 data.)

For historical state-by-state information on board actions, go to http://www.fsmb.org. Click on Media Room, then on Medical Board Disciplinary Data.