CLEAR News - Summer/Fall 2001
The Virginia Board of Medicine’s Practitioner Information Project
The Virginia Board of Medicine is proud to announce the launch of its Practitioner Information Website (www.vahealthprovider.com) July 24, 2001. The Board’s goal was to produce a system that would be a credit to the practitioners of the Commonwealth and a service to its citizens.
Virginia was the first state to offer its licensees the opportunity to submit their required information online. To date, almost 23,000 (74%) licensees took advantage of that opportunity.
Most of the required information available on the site is self-reported by the practitioners. That information includes:
*Insurance plans will be addressed in the next phase of the Practitioner Information Project.
To date, over 92% of licensed Virginia practitioners have completed their information for this website. The law requires the practitioners to report the information and the Board to make it available to the public. The Board has been very pleased with the overall responsiveness of the practitioners to report the required information.
The data collection was broken down into a step-wise process. Step one involved developing the paper questionnaire and creating a practitioner data entry website to give practitioners the opportunity to complete their questionnaire electronically. In Step two, a pretest of the paper questionnaire was conducted in January 2001, followed by a pretest of the online questionnaire that was conducted in early March 2001. After enhancements based on feedback from the pretests, the Board was ready to move to Step three which was the data collection phase that began March 26, 2001. The Board has completed the final steps of the implementation process which were the refinement of the consumer website and development of the consumer call center (804-643-4337) for those without access to the Internet.
Now that the website and call center are available to the public, the Board’s focus will be on maintaining and updating the website based on practitioners’ self-reported revisions, adding new licensees to the profiling system, and initiating the next phase of the project (developing a process to collect information on insurances plans accepted by the practitioner).
Bob Nebiker Deputy Director of the Department of Health Professions stated that he was extremely please to see this application of new technology to professional regulation. It is extremely cost effective, fast and accurate. We communicate directly with the consumer of regulated services seven days a week 24 hours a day. A practitioner profile changes to day and it accessible to six million citizens in an instant. If the Board enters an order that restricts a license, the consumer has full and unimpeded access to that information. But, it is really much more than that.
It changes our mission. We are not just in the business of regulation professional services through testing, credential review and responding to allegations of professional misconduct. We have a significant role in how consumers can access professional services. It is about who they are, what they do, how well they are prepared, whom they associate with and what their history has been. In some ways practitioner profiling and the Web changes the paradigm of regulation. Ten years ago we were that regulatory board at the state capitol. Now we are a comprehensive directory that assists a patient looking for a surgeon in her hometown with admitting privileges at you closest hospital together with her office address. You may link to her web site or send her an email.