Texas Law Aims to Prevent Another ‘Dr. Death’

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed into law on Tuesday a bill that will give the state’s medical board additional teeth to protect patients from potentially dangerous doctors, according to local news reports.

The bill, HB 1998, was introduced in response to an investigation by local NBC affiliate KXAN that found at least 49 doctors were practicing in Texas despite having their licenses revoked in other states. There was no record of those actions on the Texas Medical Board’s physician profile pages, despite being required by law, KXAN reported.

The news outlet published the investigation, called “Still Practicing,” 5 years after Christopher Duntsch, MD, was sentenced to life in prison in 2017 for harming patients while he worked as a neurosurgeon at various Texas hospitals.

Duntsch earned the nickname “Dr. Death” in a 2016 D Magazine article, and it stuck after his story aired in a serialized podcast by the same name. Duntsch reportedly harmed or killed more than 30 patients.

The new law includes several provisions to better enable the board to protect patients from dangerous doctors and boost transparency, including the following:

• Lying on a medical license application will be a Class A misdemeanor “unless the actor’s intent is to defraud or harm another, in which the event is a state jail felony,” according to the new law.
• Doctors who’ve had their medical license revoked, restricted, or suspended in another state will not be allowed to practice in Texas.
• Doctors who’ve been convicted of a felony or misdemeanor related to moral turpitude won’t be allowed to practice in Texas.
• All doctors will be required to be fingerprinted as part of a criminal background check.
• All doctors will be required to be monitored monthly via the National Practitioner Data Bank.
• The Texas Medical Board will have to update physician profiles on its website within 10 days of any disciplinary action.

Sherif Zaafran, MD, president of the Texas Medical Board, told KXAN he’s “grateful” for the law and the resources to better protect and inform patients.

“I’m grateful for the legislature granting us the authority and the funding to continuously monitor the National Practitioner Data Bank as well as fingerprinting all our licensees,” Zaafran told KXAN. “We can now rely on real-time data to update physician profiles in real-time and protect the public with up-to-date and current information on all our licensees.”

In the first story in its series, KXAN reported that spinal surgeon Robert Henderson, MD — who reported Duntsch to the Texas Medical Board and was “instrumental in stopping him” — cautioned that it’s not “just a state problem. It’s a national problem.”

As to another “Dr. Death” popping up in the U.S., Henderson said, “I think the odds of it are pretty darn high.”

The new law takes effect on September 1.

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