The Federation of State Medical Board’s (FSMB) 2014-2020 Strategic Plan www.fsmb.org suggests expanding FSMB’s data sharing and research capabilities to provide valuable information to state medical boards, the public, and other stakeholders.
All state medical boards share licensure and disciplinary information with one another by contributing data to the FSMB’s Physician Data Center (PDC) www.fsmb.org/pdc. Over the past two years, the FSMB has made substantial improvements to the PDC and in 2015 introduced a new portal system called the “Disciplinary Alert Service” to facilitate more streamlined “one stop shopping” for information on physician disciplinary profiles and credentials.
For consumers, the FSMB has developed a national database of consolidated physician licensure and disciplinary information called “DocInfo” http://s1.fsmb.org/docinfo which has data from the PDC along with details such as license history, medical school attended, practice location, and specialty designation. The FSAMB has received more than 4,000 “DocInfo” queries from the public in 2014 and plans to develop a new no-fee physician information service for consumers in 2015.
The FSMB is implementing a Master Data Management System. The plan is to transition from a multi-system data architecture environment to one in which all data systems are part of a single integrated enterprise.
Since 2014, the FSMB’s data team has significantly improved its capacity to send, receive, and compile data from state medical boards and other stakeholders. Over the past year, the data team has successfully loaded more than 870 licensure files containing more than 25 million individual physician and physician assistant records into the new system.
The FSMB Research and Data Integrational Department is implementing new research projects and collaborating with state medical boards and other partner organizations on existing research projects. So far, the American Board of Medical Specialties www.abms.org and the American Osteopathic Association www.osteopathic.org have been working with FSMB.
FSMB has completed their third “Census of Actively Licensed Physicians in the U.S.” and will use the data from 2014 to create detailed geographic maps for state medical boards illustrating the number of actively licensed physicians who have licenses to practice in each state.
FSMB is able to help in national disasters. After 9/11 attacks, Congress authorized the “Emergency System for Advance Registration of Volunteer Health Professionals (ESAR-VHP) www.phe.gov/esarvhp/pages/about.aspx. ESAR-VHP was established to standardize volunteer registration programs in times of disaster, public health, and for medical emergencies.
The FSMB now works closely with ESAR-VHP to provide data services for federal programs. This helps to prepare the U.S. to mobilize health care volunteers in times of disasters and enables state jurisdictions and software vendors to establish guidelines for the ongoing submission of physician files for monitoring.