npdb {UsingR} | R Documentation

## National Practioner Data Bank

### Description

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

### Usage

    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 http://www.npdb-hipdb.com/npdb.html:

“The legislation that led to the creation of the NPDB was enacted the U.S. Congress believed that the increasing occurrence of medical malpractice litigation and the need to improve the quality of medical care had become nationwide problems that warranted greater efforts than any individual State could undertake. The intent is to improve the quality of health care by encouraging State licensing boards, hospitals and other health care entities, and professional societies to identify and discipline those who engage in unprofessional behavior; and to restrict the ability of incompetent physicians, dentists, and other health care practitioners to move from State to State without disclosure or discovery of previous medical malpractice payment and adverse action history. Adverse actions can involve licensure, clinical privileges, professional society membership, and exclusions from Medicare and Medicaid.”

### Source

This data came from http://www.npdb-hipdb.com/npdb.html

### Examples

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

[Package UsingR version 0.1-4 Index]