Contract awarded for malpractice databases
- By Judi Hasson
- Jan 14, 2001
SRA International Inc. has been awarded a six-year, $77 million contract
to operate two databases with information on health care providers who have
had malpractice settlements and other negative actions against them.
The database, sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services,
is operated by SRA from the company's offices in Fair Lakes, Va., where
it keeps adverse information on more than 160,000 doctors, dentists, nurses
and other health professionals.
The databases —the National Practitioner Data
Bank(NPDB) and the Health Care Integrity and Protection Data Bank (HIPDB)—were established by Congress as national repositories to help safeguard
health care systems against high-risk practitioners moving from state to
state or job to job to continue practicing medicine.
It gives health care providers a way to see if any malpractice judgments
have been made against job applicants or employees. The data is Web-based
and eliminates the need to have a paper-based system, said Renny DiPentima,
president of SRA's government sector.
The database, designed and implemented by SRA seven years ago, processes
more than 3 million transactions a year.
The fee-for-query system is accessible through the Internet to authorized
users and generates more than $12 million in revenue a year for the federal
government.