Check registration licensing status doctor

This information can assist in helping you choose a physician or allied health care provider or find out more about the physician or allied health care provider you go to now. Please be aware that the law authorizes the Board to post certain information on the physician's profile indefinitely and other specified information for a limited period of time.

This information includes notification when a doctor is suspended, revoked, or placed on probation. Note: If your physician is an osteopathic doctor D. If the site is temporarily unavailable, please try again later or call our Consumer Information Unit at between the hours of A. You must be unable to independently perform some basic daily living tasks. These may include eating, walking, getting from the bed to a chair, dressing, bathing, or using a toilet.

Does the policy cover nursing home care? Will it cover assisted living facilities that provide less care than a nursing home? If you want to stay in your home, will it pay for visiting nurses and therapists? What about help with food preparation and housecleaning? Most plans provide a specific dollar benefit per day. The benefit for home care is usually about half the nursing home benefit. But some policies pay the same for both forms of care.

Other plans pay only for your actual expenses. You can get a policy with lifetime benefits but this will cost more. Other options for coverage are from one to six years. The average nursing home stay is about 2. If you buy a policy before age 60, the fixed daily benefit may not be enough by the time you need it. You can further research the doctor with the state physician licensing board in each state where he or she is licensed.

Doctors may claim various board certifications in medical specialties. These credentials are verified by medical facilities who employ them or grant them privileges, but you may check board certification as well. Doctors may be board-certified in one area, but actually practicing in a different area of medicine. For an older doctor, this may be less important than one who is younger and just getting started in practice.

You may not know how old a doctor is when all you have is a name, so this information will give you some insight into his or her background and education credentials. The FSMB site shows medical school education and graduation dates. In some states, there will be more information about residency on their licensing site.

For others, you'll get the information most quickly at a site like UCompareHealthcare. These are related to malpractice or other disciplinary actions brought against the physician. There will be only basic information, but this is a prompt to search further with the state licensing board and online searches.

There are reasons you want to establish an approximate age of the physician. If a doctor is quite a bit older than you are, and may retire or leave practice before you get older yourself, then you may want to keep searching for one who is younger, or at least closer in age to you.

If your medical problem is acute, then this will be less important. However, if your symptoms or diagnosis are chronic, you'll want to establish a relationship with a doctor who can treat you during the rest of your lifetime. You may be interested in seeing a doctor who has been in practice for a long time and is therefore very experienced.

Conversely, you may be interested in a younger doctor who has been taught in medical school to use more modern equipment or may be more up-to-date on research in a specialty area. You may be able to assess how long a physician has practiced in one place at your states' medical licensing board site, or it may require one of the online doctor listing sites.

For example, if a doctor is 50 years old, but appears to have been practicing in his or her location for fewer than 10 years, that indicates an interruption in his or her practice. An interruption may be due to a variety of circumstances. For example, a doctor may have decided to move to Florida and will retire in a few years, or he may have lost his license due to negligence in another state before moving to their current location.

If the doctor has not been licensed for as long as you think he or she should have been, then do some general digging on the web using that doctor's name and possibly other states' names to see if you can turn up his or her former practice. That may give you a clue as to why the doctor moved. Doctors must apply for privileges to admit and treat patients at hospitals. If you have a preferred hospital, it is important that the doctor has privileges to practice there.

Some sites will note which hospitals a doctor is affiliated with. Facilities where a doctor has privileges do additional and ongoing checks of the doctor's credentials, which can be an assurance of their validity. A doctor may have been reported problems for anything from a bad attitude to an unclean office to malpractice.

Problems for others may become problems for you. The FSMB site will list any actions related to medical malpractice , but you may want to do further web searches for the doctor by name for suits that may be pending.

To find general commentary about a doctor's practice, you might turn to some of the online doctors' rating sites. However, be aware that these ratings are subjective and may have been influenced in many ways. If the doctor is involved in medical research, then their involvement is important to you.

Not all doctors participate in medical research, but if they are affiliated with academic or university medical centers, there is a good chance they are.