When you, as a physician, reach an agreement with OPMC in the form of a Consent Order that puts an end to the matter, OPMC takes the position that all Orders will be published for transparency. The Orders are typically published on the OPMC website, where any member of the public can read them, on the National Practitioner Data Bank, and are sent to the Federation of State Medical Boards. This publishing can be extremely detrimental to you, the physician, because your hospital, your medical group, health insurance companies, and the general public will be able to read the Order to which you have agreed. Often, you have agreed to some type of conduct that can lead to your dismissal from your employment, or the insurance companies might remove you from their provider lists. Also, if you have, or have had in the past, a medical license in another state, that state will discover the issue and may decide to also inquire into the issue, which can lead to another report to the Data Bank, etc. All of this can be very injurious to your reputation and your career. Due to this situation, we try our best to convince OPMC to agree that the Order in question will not be published anywhere. This article discusses an Order that, in fact, was not published anywhere.
The case involved a physician who had a psychological/mental health issue that caused him/her to send outrageously worded emails to another physician who worked at the same facility. These emails were simply totally out of line and caused the client’s immediate termination from his/her employment. After this event, the physician sought out therapy and, happily, that therapy enabled the physician to recover to the extent that he/she obtained another employment position, and was in that position when OPMC opened up an investigation.
Our defense of the physician was that the problem/conduct was caused by a mental illness, and that it was not legally or morally correct to punish a person for something that happened due to an illness. We went back and forth with OPMC for months, and we presented medical and workplace documentation that supported our position that the physician did something wrong because of an illness; had obtained treatment for that illness; was successfully treated for that illness, and was functioning perfectly well for a period of several years in a medical setting.
Our point was that there was no reason to have any resolution of this matter made public, as the publication could very well lead to the loss of the physician’s employment and the inability to work anywhere else. Additionally, since this physician had previously had medical licenses in several other states, there was a good chance that any report to the Federation of State Medical Boards could result in having those states open up an investigation of the doctor, and that would lead to more legal expenses and perhaps additional reports to the Data Bank by some or all of those states. In our view, none of that should happen because, again, this all arose out of a mental illness, not due to a moral character flaw.
In the end, OPMC agreed with us, and the doctor’s Order, with the need for a short period of continued therapy, was entered into, and this Order was not published anywhere. In our opinion, this was an excellent result because it ensured that no unnecessary harm came to the doctor as a result of signing the Order.
The moral of this story is that when you have the right case, obtain the necessary evaluations, medical and workplace, to support your position. If you do that, you might well obtain the best possible result from a situation that, at first blush, appeared to be indefensible.
