Malpractice
The malpractice file you can download, and the one you cannot
The National Practitioner Data Bank holds medical-malpractice payments and certain adverse actions against practitioners. Eligible hospitals and boards can query named records. The public cannot. What HRSA will give a journalist is a stripped file: counts, payment bands, years, and allegation codes, with no names of doctors, patients, or payers.
Federal law at 42 U.S.C. § 11137(b) requires that presentation. The current public-use file, updated in August 2026, covers reports received from September 1, 1990 through June 30, 2026. It includes malpractice payments, licensure and clinical-privilege actions, DEA actions, and HHS-OIG exclusions. It is for statistics. Combining it with other sources to re-identify a person is the thing the statute forbids.
That is the gap this desk lives in. A manufacturer warning letter is a public FDA file with a firm’s name on it. A malpractice payment on a practitioner is a named NPDB record that does not ship to the open web. State medical-board sites sometimes post their own orders; those orders are a different public file, with their own rules, and they are not a substitute for an NPDB query.
A device letter is not a malpractice finding. The public-use file is how you measure, in the aggregate, whether payments and board actions are even being reported — not who they are about.
npdb.hrsa.gov — Public Use Data File
These notes paraphrase a public government record. They are not legal advice.