You're picking a doctor for something that matters. Verify before you book.
An oncologist your insurance suggested. A surgeon your primary care doctor referred. A psychiatrist a friend recommended. Before the first appointment, you want to know: is this person actually licensed in your state, board-certified in the specialty they advertise, free of federal exclusion, and absent from a pattern of malpractice filings? Public records hold all of that. We synthesize them into a report you can read in five minutes.
Why this is harder than it should be
If you have ever tried to verify a doctor on your own, you already know the experience. You start with the doctor's website, which lists credentials but offers no way to confirm them. You move to a review site like Healthgrades or Zocdoc, which tells you about wait times and bedside manner but nothing about whether the physician is currently licensed. You search the state medical board, which is sometimes well-designed and sometimes a 1998-era state-government portal that requires the exact spelling and middle initial. You try the American Board of Medical Specialties website to confirm specialty certification. You wonder whether you should also check the Office of Inspector General exclusion list, because you read somewhere that it matters, but you do not know what it is or how to find it.
Each of these steps takes ten or twenty minutes. Each one returns a fragment. Stitching the fragments together into a coherent picture takes hours, and even then you are not sure whether you missed something. You also have no easy way to look at malpractice filings, hospital affiliations, or pharmaceutical payments under the Sunshine Act. Those records exist, are public, and are searchable, but they live in CourtListener, hospital medical-staff rosters, and the CMS Open Payments database respectively. Most patients have never heard of any of those.
The harder problem is recency. State medical board pages can be cached for months by Google. The OIG LEIE is updated monthly, but a stale browser tab will show last quarter's data. ABMS certification has recertification cycles that change. A check you ran six months ago when you first considered the doctor is not the same as a check you run today. The records exist; assembling them at this moment, in one place, with consistent formatting, is the part nobody has time for.
And then there is the question nobody likes to think about: how do I read these records once I have them? An OIG match is dispositive, but a CourtListener civil malpractice filing is not adjudicated wrongdoing. A high CMS Open Payments figure for a single drug manufacturer is a flag, but plenty of legitimate clinical-trial researchers receive substantial industry payments. A patient needs the data and a defamation-aware framework that says "this is what the record means, and this is what it does not mean." That framework is what we put around the report.
What MentionFox brings to this job
The Physician Vetter is the workhorse. The methodology pages explain how every record is sourced and what each one means. The methodology library extends to dentists, therapists, and pharmacists for adjacent care decisions. The Verification Vetter methodology is the trust spine that runs through all of them.
Physician Vetter
The flagship report for any US physician. Twelve sections in the full report: identity and credentials, specialty certification, license and disciplinary history, CMS Open Payments, hospital affiliations, publication and research record, comparable physicians, public reputation, malpractice surface, network connections, and full source citations. The Snapshot tier at 10 credits covers the essentials: NPI verified, OIG clean or flagged, state board lookup URL, ABMS or ABPN cert status, and top public-reputation flags. Returns in roughly sixty seconds. The full report at 50 credits returns in three to five minutes.
Physician Methodology
The full methodology behind every Physician Vetting Report. Four-class source taxonomy: Federal-Primary (CMS, OIG, NIH), Authoritative-Secondary (state boards, ABMS, ABPN), Aggregator (Healthgrades, Google reviews), and Unverified. The UK Professional Head of Intelligence Assessment Probability Yardstick provides confidence statements. The disambiguation hard-gate prevents wrong-person reports. Defamation guardrails preserve the report's defensibility. Read this if you want to understand exactly what the report does and does not assert.
Therapist Methodology
For mental health care decisions. Covers state licensing boards across all fifty states, the Association of Social Work Boards records, the American Board of Professional Psychology certification status, and the modality-specific certifying bodies for trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, dialectical behavior therapy, and internal family systems. Includes the same OIG LEIE federal exclusion check applied to mental health providers, plus state-specific board complaint records where published.
Dentist Methodology
For dental care decisions. Covers state dental boards, the ADA-recognized specialty boards (American Board of Endodontics, American Board of Periodontology, American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, American Board of Orthodontics, American Board of Pediatric Dentistry, American Board of Prosthodontics, American Board of Oral Medicine, American Board of Dental Public Health, American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology), DEA registration where applicable, and the federal exclusion list. Useful for evaluating a dentist before a major procedure like an implant placement, root canal retreatment, or full-mouth rehabilitation.
Pharmacist Methodology
For evaluating a compounding pharmacy or independent pharmacist managing complex medication regimens. Covers state pharmacy boards, the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy records, the Pharmacy Compounding Accreditation Board where the pharmacy compounds, DEA registration, and the federal OIG exclusion list. Particularly relevant when patients are sourcing specialty medications, hormone therapy, or pediatric formulations through a non-chain pharmacy.
Verification Vetter Methodology
The trust spine that runs through every vetter on the platform. Explains the source-class taxonomy, the confidence framework, the citation discipline, the defamation guardrails, and the disambiguation hard-gate. If you want to understand the methodology behind every report on every subject type before trusting any specific report, this is the document. It is what an investigative journalist or an expert witness would read first.
A typical workflow — what a patient actually does
A patient is referred to an oncologist by her primary care doctor for a suspected malignancy. The referral comes with a name, a hospital affiliation, and a phone number. Before scheduling the consultation, she opens the Physician Vetter, types the doctor's name and state into the search field, and selects from the candidate chooser when two physicians with similar names appear. The disambiguation gate confirms the right NPI before any credits are charged.
She runs a Snapshot for 10 credits. In sixty seconds, she has the verified identity from the CMS NPI Registry, an OIG LEIE federal exclusion check that returns clean, the state medical board lookup URL surfaced directly so she can click through and confirm active licensure, the ABMS board certification status confirming the doctor is a board-certified medical oncologist, and the top public-reputation flags from Healthgrades and Google. Everything checks out, but she wants more depth before a high-stakes consultation. She upgrades to the full report for 50 credits.
Three minutes later she has twelve sections. The malpractice surface from CourtListener shows two civil filings over the past fifteen years, both settled, both framed as litigation activity rather than adjudicated wrongdoing — about par for an oncologist with a thirty-year practice. The CMS Open Payments section shows a moderate research-payment history concentrated in two clinical trials, which she cross-references with the publication record from PubMed and finds the same trials cited as senior author. The hospital affiliations section confirms the academic medical center on the referral. She prints the report and brings it to the consultation.
What she did not do: spend three hours toggling between state medical board portals, the OIG website, ABMS certification matters, CourtListener docket searches, and Healthgrades. The report did the assembly. She did the reading.
What data sources the report draws from
Every claim in a Physician Vetting Report is anchored to a named, public, federal-or-state source. The methodology page lists every source class and how it is weighted. For patient-evaluating-doctors specifically, these are the sources that drive the report.
- CMS NPI Registry — the canonical National Provider Identifier database maintained by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Provides verified identity, primary taxonomy, sub-specialty taxonomies, practice address, enumeration date, and credential string (MD, DO, MBBS).
- OIG LEIE — the Office of Inspector General List of Excluded Individuals and Entities. The federal exclusion list. A positive match means the physician is barred from billing Medicare or Medicaid. Quoted verbatim from the federal record.
- State medical boards — fifty state boards plus the District of Columbia. Each publishes licensure status and disciplinary actions. The lookup URL for the relevant state is surfaced in the report so the credentialing-of-record verification is one click away.
- American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) — the umbrella organization for the twenty-four medical specialty boards. Certification status across the physician's listed specialties is checked. Recertification cycles surface where applicable.
- American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN) — for psychiatric and neurological subspecialties.
- Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) — verifies residency and fellowship training program accreditation, which validates the training-pedigree claims a physician makes on their bio page.
- CMS Open Payments — the Sunshine Act database. Tracks payments from pharmaceutical and medical-device manufacturers to physicians. Total payments by category over the most recent reporting years.
- PubMed and NIH RePORTER — for academic-physician verification. Publication record, h-index proxy via NIH iCite, NIH grant history.
- CourtListener — federal and state court docket aggregator. Civil malpractice case search by name and specialty. Framed as litigation activity, never adjudicated wrongdoing. Strong defamation guardrails apply.
- Healthgrades and Google reviews — patient-experience aggregators. Treated as sentiment signal, never as quality assessment. Volume and recency surfaced; specific quotes never excerpted.
The four-class source taxonomy is explicit. Federal-Primary sources carry the highest weight. State boards, ABMS, and ABPN are Authoritative-Secondary. Aggregator sites like Healthgrades are signal, not verdict. Unverified claims are tagged, not laundered.
Sample report walkthrough
The canonical sample is Anthony Stephen Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The full Physician Vetting Report covers his career arc as a federal physician-scientist, NIH grant record, publication depth, and post-retirement public-reputation pattern. Federal-Primary sources only.
For the snapshot tier shape, see the Anthony Fauci Snapshot. For an emergency-medicine-focused subject, see the Jocko R. Zifferblatt sample. For a current-practice oncology surgeon, see the Atul Gawande Snapshot.
Pricing for this use case
Physician Snapshot
10 credits. Returns in roughly sixty seconds. NPI verified, OIG LEIE clean or flagged, state board lookup URL, ABMS or ABPN cert status, top public-reputation flags. The right tier for most patient-evaluating-doctors decisions where you want fast confirmation that the basics check out before booking.
Physician Vetting Report
50 credits. Returns in three to five minutes. All twelve sections, 1,800-3,500 words. Full disciplinary surface, Open Payments breakdown, publication and grant record, hospital affiliations, malpractice surface, comparable-physician cohort, full source citations. The right tier for a high-stakes care decision such as cancer treatment, neurosurgery, fertility, or gender-affirming care.
Credits are sold in packs and via monthly subscription. See the full pricing page for credit-pack options.
Mini case studies
The mother choosing a pediatric cardiologist
Her daughter has been diagnosed with a congenital heart defect and the local children's hospital has assigned a pediatric cardiologist. Before the consultation, she runs a Snapshot. The NPI verifies the doctor as a board-certified pediatric cardiologist via the American Board of Pediatrics. The state medical board lookup confirms active licensure with no disciplinary history. The OIG LEIE returns clean. The publication record from PubMed shows fifteen years of pediatric cardiology research with strong h-index. She walks into the consultation confident she has the right doctor for her daughter.
The adult patient choosing a psychiatrist
He has been prescribed a medication regimen by his primary care doctor and wants a psychiatrist for ongoing management. He picks three names from his insurance directory and runs a Snapshot on each for 30 credits total. Two come back clean and ABPN board-certified. The third returns a state board disciplinary action from 2019 — an order related to record-keeping that has since been resolved. He chooses one of the two clean candidates and uses the report to skip the call-around-and-cross-check phase entirely.
Frequently asked questions
Why would a patient run a verification report on a doctor?
Because the cost of picking the wrong specialist for serious care is enormous, and review-site stars do not tell you whether a doctor is excluded from federal Medicare and Medicaid programs, currently licensed in the state, or board-certified by the American Board of Medical Specialties. A patient-grade report surfaces those facts in plain English in roughly sixty seconds.
Where does the data come from?
Federal and state public records. The CMS NPI Registry is the canonical identity anchor. The OIG LEIE is the federal exclusion list. State medical boards publish licensure status and disciplinary actions. The American Board of Medical Specialties and American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology publish certification status. CMS Open Payments tracks pharmaceutical and device-manufacturer payments to physicians.
Is this a substitute for a state medical board check?
No. The report aggregates and synthesizes public records — it is not a credentialing-of-record verification. The state medical board lookup URL is surfaced directly so the verification of record is one click away.
Will the doctor know I ran a report?
No. Reports are private to the buyer unless explicitly marked shareable. Physicians are not notified that a report was run on them.
What does it cost?
A Physician Snapshot is 10 credits and returns in roughly sixty seconds. A full Physician Vetting Report is 50 credits and returns in three to five minutes. See the pricing page for credit-pack options.
Can I run a report on a therapist, dentist, or pharmacist?
Yes. The therapist methodology covers state licensing boards and specialty certification bodies. The dentist methodology covers state dental boards and ADA-recognized specialty boards. The pharmacist methodology covers state pharmacy boards and compounding accreditation. Each follows the same federal-records-first methodology as the Physician Vetter.
What is the OIG LEIE?
The Office of Inspector General List of Excluded Individuals and Entities — a federal list of providers excluded from billing Medicare or Medicaid. A positive match is dispositive: that doctor cannot be paid by federal health programs. For a patient choosing a specialist, an exclusion is a strong signal to look elsewhere.
Does the report tell me if a doctor is good at their job?
No. No public-record report can. What it tells you is whether the doctor is licensed, certified by the relevant specialty board, free of federal exclusion, and present or absent in malpractice civil case filings. Quality of bedside care, surgical skill, and diagnostic accuracy require direct clinical review and patient experience.