About the Authors
- Azza AbuDagga
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* E-mail: aabudagga@citizen.org
Affiliation Health Research Group, Public Citizen, Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America
- Sidney M. Wolfe
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Contributed equally to this work with: Sidney M. Wolfe, Michael Carome, Robert E. Oshel
Affiliation Health Research Group, Public Citizen, Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America
- Michael Carome
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Contributed equally to this work with: Sidney M. Wolfe, Michael Carome, Robert E. Oshel
Affiliation Health Research Group, Public Citizen, Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America
- Robert E. Oshel
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Contributed equally to this work with: Sidney M. Wolfe, Michael Carome, Robert E. Oshel
Affiliation National Practitioner Data Bank (Retired), Department of Health and Human Services, Silver Spring, Maryland, United States of America
Competing Interests
All authors have read the journal’s policy, and the authors of this manuscript have no financial competing interests. AA, SMW, and MC are employees of Public Citizen, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that has long worked on issues related to medical board oversight and physician accountability. Thus, these authors may be seen to have an intellectual competing interest. REO has no competing interests and received no compensation from Public Citizen for work on this paper, but he would like to disclose that he was Associate Director for Research and Dispute of the Data Banks before his retirement in 2008. In that capacity he designed the public-use NPDB file used in this study.
Author Contributions
Conceived and designed the experiments: AA SMW MC REO. Analyzed the data: AA. Wrote the paper: AA SMW MC REO.