I worked for a company that gathered medical license information from all 50 states into a central source. We gathered the "good lists" and the "bad lists" I liked to say; the license lists and the sanction lists. I heard stories about sanctioned doctors or nurses just moving to another state to continue practicing, though I don't personally know if those stories are true, it's easy to imagine the value of checking all these lists in a central location.
The problem is all this data from every state is very very similar, but it's a huge job to gather all this data together. The company was doing a very poor job of it as well, with lots of tech debt and incompetent management. There was lots of legally questionable web scraping and manual work. Many states (shamefully) charge money to be able to see what doctors and nurses have been sanctioned, and actively try to prevent the data from being scraped.
All this could be eliminated with a federally mandated data format. That entire company of 300 people could be automated away easily. While I was working there I was always aware that part of everyone's high medical bill ended up in my paycheck: the hospitals and clinics paid this company, and the company paid me.
> I heard stories about sanctioned doctors or nurses just moving to another state to continue practicing, though I don't personally know if those stories are true, it's easy to imagine the value of checking all these lists in a central location.
This was one of the reasons "Dr. Death" was able to keep practicing as long as he did. He resigned from positions and switched facilities/states before the investigations could be completed.
I think that public positions and critical positions, such as police/LEO, Doctors, Nurses, Teachers and other positions (maybe nuke plant operators) etc - should all have a UUID for each person - and one (with appropriate reasoning) should be able to track the UUID of any employee across the nation - such that you cant just shuffle offenders/let them shuffle themselves about assuming their is misconduct - and maybe even provide a further incentivization program for those who have stellar records - like "doctor of the month for the state" or Police officer of the year for the nation" etc...
Would be nice, but as a start, if we could just create a law that states can't hind their sanction lists behind paywalls, that would go a long way. You're less safe in state X because state Y charges a lot of money to get access to their sanction lists.
The problem is all this data from every state is very very similar, but it's a huge job to gather all this data together. The company was doing a very poor job of it as well, with lots of tech debt and incompetent management. There was lots of legally questionable web scraping and manual work. Many states (shamefully) charge money to be able to see what doctors and nurses have been sanctioned, and actively try to prevent the data from being scraped.
All this could be eliminated with a federally mandated data format. That entire company of 300 people could be automated away easily. While I was working there I was always aware that part of everyone's high medical bill ended up in my paycheck: the hospitals and clinics paid this company, and the company paid me.