Attorney seeks to keep doctor’s reprimand from national database

By Steve Green

Thursday, Oct. 6, 2011 | 5:06 p.m.

A Las Vegas attorney scrambled Thursday to block the State Board of Medical Examiners from putting disciplinary information about a doctor into a national database.

The board regulating Nevada medical professionals planned to report a public reprimand of Dr. James Tate over a 2008 incident at University Medical Center.

The board claimed Tate had brought disrepute to the medical profession when arguments erupted with family members of a patient. Tate denied the allegations, but the board reprimanded him, fined him $1,000 and ordered him to take 10 hours of continuing medical education.

Clark County District Court Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez last month issued a restraining order halting the board’s action – but that was overturned Wednesday by the Nevada Supreme Court.

So on Thursday, Tate’s attorney Jacob Hafter filed an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order in federal court in Las Vegas.

If granted, it would block the State Board of Medical Examiners from filing a report on Tate to the National Practitioner Data Bank.

Hafter, who regularly represents doctors in lawsuits and before the Board of Medical Examiners, charged in the motion that the board’s action was made "without any support in the evidentiary record."

"In doing so, defendants violated Dr. Tate’s constitutional due process rights in two ways. First, they enforced a statute which is unconstitutionally vague, and second, they failed to provide him adequate notice of the charges of which he was found guilty," Hafter’s filing said.

Hafter said in his complaint that the board plans to file its report with the national data bank by Friday and that "this will have a disastrous effect" on Tate and the property rights he holds in his medical license.

"Dr. Tate is licensed in multiple states and has clinical privileges at multiple hospitals. As a result of the NPDB report and the board’s findings, he will have to report this to all of the states where he is licensed, hospitals where he has privileges and insurance companies for whom he is a provider. He will have to spend countless hours and financial resources defending himself against all of the subsequent individual investigations which all of the agencies are obligated to initiate," the filing said.

"He may be subject to discipline by these agencies," the filing said. "The worst part is that once filed, unless the reporting agency agrees to void the report, it can never be undone. An NPDB report is truly a bell which cannot be unrung."

The state board hasn't yet responded to Hafter's motion and it wasn’t clear late Thursday when or if the federal court would act on the emergency request.