I haven’t yet had a chance to read the whole report, but a good executive summary from the California Research Bureau says a lot about the state of physician discipline, medical malpractice and public disclosure in California:

National data suggest that the volume of “Quality of Care” complaints received by the Board each year falls far short (by an order of magnitude) of the number of serious injuries Californians receive in hospitals each year due to negligent or incompetent care.

Consumers likely would benefit from policy changes that would expand and lengthen public disclosure and Internet display of a variety of information about physicians’ records, including malpractice payouts, MBC enforcement actions, and MBC citations and fines.  

Medical Boards in several other states, both large and small, provide considerably more accessible information about physicians on their Internet websites than does the MBC.