According to a 2019 review of medical board websites, New Mexico’s medical board is among the worst in country when it comes to helping you find out if the New Mexico Medical Board has put your doctor on probation for misconduct or if your doctor has paid settlements for medical malpractice payouts or been convicted of a crime.
It’s easy to know nothing about your doctor’s record
Every year, American state licensing boards discipline thousands of American doctors for overprescribing, using dangerous methods or for behavior that reflects poorly on the profession, such as personal misconduct, abusing alcohol or medication or other controlled substances, and more.
Such disciplinary actions typically allow doctors to continue practicing medicine, so without know it, you may be seeing a doctor currently under discipline from the New Mexico Medical Board.
Consumer advocates rate state medical board sites
Two nonprofit organizations dedicated to consumer advocacy and education, Consumer Reports and the Informed Patient Institute, joined forces to survey the websites of every state medical board to rate how fully and easily each allows the state’s patients to know the fact about their health care providers.
Such information is valuable to patients and their families when shopping for doctors. Such information may also help patients put concerns they’re having about their doctor into a clearer context, perhaps when deciding whether to consult a medical malpractice attorney.
New Mexico fared poorly. The advocacy organizations rate state medical board websites a scale of 1 to 100, with New Mexico’s website receiving a score of only 34, one of the lowest in the country.
Obstacles to information faced by New Mexico patients
The board makes it difficult to find information that users may reasonably and naturally want, such as the current status of their doctor’s license, whether the board has ordered any actions against the doctor, and what effect those actions actually had on the doctor’s license.
New Mexico patients have to know and correctly spell the name of the “licensee” or their license number just to know the current status and the board’s orders. To know information on the effects of these orders on the doctor’s license, patients have to go to an entirely different part of the website and sift through board newsletters going back to 2008. From there, patients may be able to piece together a fuller history.
The organizations also cited the lack of a full profile of each doctor including disciplinary actions taken by hospitals, actions taken by the federal government, malpractice payouts and any criminal convictions.
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