Most people take steps to ensure that they end up with the right doctor for their situation. In some cases, this involves doing research before choosing a primary care physician. In other cases, a person may need to figure out which medical specialist is best for a procedure or treatment that they need. Regardless of your medical needs, you may want to know whether or not a doctor you are thinking of working with has any complaints against them. Here, we want to discuss how you can find out the history of a medical professional that you are thinking about working with.
When you began taking steps to find out whether or not a doctor has any complaints, you need to explore all avenues available to you so you can be sure that you are working with someone that you can trust.
The Federation of State Medical Boards has put together a database that they call DocInfo. This database provides background data on approximately one million licensed physicians in the United States. This will include any information regarding disciplinary action taken against the medical provider in question.
In California, you can turn to the license verification set up by the Medical Board of California. When you get to this page, you can search by name or license number, by city or county, or by survey responses. This website allows you to not only check the licensing of a physician or surgeon, but also view their postgraduate training, licensed midwives, research psychoanalysts and student research psychoanalysts, as well as a variety of special programs in the state.
If an individual has filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against a medical professional or medical facility in California, there will be a record of this in the court where the case was filed. Most court records can be found online by doing a little bit of research about your court jurisdiction and cases. Even though the information available to you online may be limited, you will still be able to see whether or not a person has faced a medical malpractice lawsuit as well as the disposition of that lawsuit.
However, we caution you to use court records as somewhat of a guideline but not a definitive measure of whether or not to work with a doctor. Many medical professionals face medical malpractice lawsuits that have no sound basis, so this may not be an indication of whether or not the medical professional should be trusted.
We encourage you to also look up the doctor in question on the Internet. When you conduct an online search, we want you to avoid using reviews put online from the medical provider where the doctor or provider works. Instead, we encourage you to look at third-party review systems. This can include Google Reviews, Yelp, Healthgrades, WebMD Physician Directory, etc.
When you type in the name of the doctor in question, look to the right side of your Internet search page, and you should be able to see a list of their reviews aggregated in one spot. If you do not, you may have to scroll through the first page of results to get various third-party reviews.
If you or a loved one has suffered injuries due to a preventable medical error, contact the Irvine medical malpractice lawyers at Callahan & Blaine today.