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Show HN: Explore doctors' disciplinary history

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Re: Show HN: Explore doctors' disciplinary history

#4

Post by jamesfly »

omarfarooq wrote: post #2

Excellent, thank you for creating this. Just learning that this data is available. Only California? Are the other states not making the data available in the same fashion as CA? Also, was there a personal trigger for you to create this?

Thank you. This data should be available in all states, but each state has a proprietary site I have to write a new scraper for and write a new data pipeline for. I'm thinking about open-sourcing the project and gathering community support for the rest now that I have a good pattern set.

Yes, I was harmed by a doctor and the medical board dismissed my complaint. This made me curious about what the board actually does take action for, but this wasn't searchable because all that was available were PDF scans that weren't digitized/OCR'd. I also noticed some documents that were referenced in doctors' profiles had disappeared. As part of this, I archived every PDF available on the wayback machine to protect against that going forward.

I also want to give credit to a similar site that I took inspiration from called 4patientsafety.org, which did some of the same stuff I have here, but completely manually. I chatted with the creator of that and he agreed making an automated version would help because they fell behind updating it due to how intensive the manual process was.

Re: Show HN: Explore doctors' disciplinary history

#5

Post by jamesfly »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #3

I just read one of these via your site at random. Holy crap, talk about incompetence! https://web.archive.org/web/0/https://www2.mbc.ca.gov/PDL/do...

It never ceases to astound me, especially since these are the most well regarded members of our society with more education than anyone else.

On another note, there are some really interesting ones like this one [1] starting on page 9 which reads like crime novel.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230926165052/https://www2.mbc....

Re: Show HN: Explore doctors' disciplinary history

#6

Post by cobertos »

jamesfly wrote: post #4
omarfarooq wrote: post #2

Excellent, thank you for creating this. Just learning that this data is available. Only California? Are the other states not making the data available in the same fashion as CA? Also, was there a personal trigger for you to create this?

Thank you. This data should be available in all states, but each state has a proprietary site I have to write a new scraper for and write a new data pipeline for. I'm thinking about open-sourcing the project and gathering community support for the rest now that I have a good pattern set. Yes, I was harmed by a doctor and the medical board dismissed my complaint. This made me curious about what the board actually does…

Is there a link to the community where this is being developed? I was unable to find one on the site itself. I'd be interested in writing a scraper for my state and the digitization pipeline.

Re: Show HN: Explore doctors' disciplinary history

#7

Post by heliostatic »

jamesfly wrote: post #4
omarfarooq wrote: post #2

Excellent, thank you for creating this. Just learning that this data is available. Only California? Are the other states not making the data available in the same fashion as CA? Also, was there a personal trigger for you to create this?

Thank you. This data should be available in all states, but each state has a proprietary site I have to write a new scraper for and write a new data pipeline for. I'm thinking about open-sourcing the project and gathering community support for the rest now that I have a good pattern set. Yes, I was harmed by a doctor and the medical board dismissed my complaint. This made me curious about what the board actually does…

You may want to look at courtlistener.org as inspiration--similar set of problems, but in a different space obviously.

Re: Show HN: Explore doctors' disciplinary history

#9

Post by yorwba »

jamesfly wrote: post #4
omarfarooq wrote: post #2

Excellent, thank you for creating this. Just learning that this data is available. Only California? Are the other states not making the data available in the same fashion as CA? Also, was there a personal trigger for you to create this?

Thank you. This data should be available in all states, but each state has a proprietary site I have to write a new scraper for and write a new data pipeline for. I'm thinking about open-sourcing the project and gathering community support for the rest now that I have a good pattern set. Yes, I was harmed by a doctor and the medical board dismissed my complaint. This made me curious about what the board actually does…

> I archived every PDF available on the wayback machine

How did you tell archive.org to store the PDFs? It doesn't seem to have worked in all cases, since when I went to check out the single "order vacating automatic cancellation of certificate", there was no snapshot yet.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231009140931/https://www2.mbc....

Re: Show HN: Explore doctors' disciplinary history

#10

Post by the_sleaze9 »

cobertos wrote: post #6
jamesfly wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. This data should be available in all states, but each state has a proprietary site I have to write a new scraper for and write a new data pipeline for. I'm thinking about open-sourcing the project and gathering community support for the rest now that I have a good pattern set. Yes, I was harmed by a doctor and the medical board dismissed my complaint. This made me curious about what the board actually does…

Is there a link to the community where this is being developed? I was unable to find one on the site itself. I'd be interested in writing a scraper for my state and the digitization pipeline.

I'd be interested in helping out as well, looking forward to it
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