On March 1, 2010, changes to section 1921 of the Social Security Act will go into effect. Section 1921 is intended to provide increased protection against unfit and fraudulent healthcare providers. The new rule expands the information contained in the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB) to include adverse licensure actions taken against all licensed healthcare practitioners by state and federal licensing agencies, peer review organizations, and private accreditation organizations. Under the rule, this data will be available for the first time to non-federal institutions. As the NPDB is recognized as one of the main credentialing resources, these changes have raised a lot of questions among medical services professionals.
Click here to view the Federal Register, which includes charts that offer a side-by-side comparison of the HCQIA (NPDB), Section 1921 (NPDB), and Section 1128E (HIPDB) to answer the questions:
- Who reports?
- What information is available?
- Who can query?