- Nevada board of medicine wants me to have a peer review verification#
- Nevada board of medicine wants me to have a peer review license#
“This delayed the process by months,” Foon said.įoon said the fact that he was board certified in internal medicine, medical oncology and hematology should have been enough verification for the medical board that he had been trained in those fields. He said the medical board asked him to get signed letters from physicians who were present during his training stating that the original records didn’t exist. In the UCLA case, Foon ran into a different problem: The records no longer existed. I then began to contact senior physicians who were present during my training at various institutions to send letters to the board to verify that I trained at the institution.” “When we found these individuals, they were equally unhelpful or clueless as to what to do.
The Nevada Cancer Institute’s staff “spent hours on the phone pleading with disinterested clerks to connect us with the appropriate people,” Foon said. The credentialing specialist who helped Foon was told that UCLA’s records only date back 10 years.Īlso, it took the credentialing staff four attempts to receive verification from the Washington VA Medical Center in Washington, D.C., that Foon had completed his internal medicine residency there. Heather Murren, president of the Nevada Cancer Institute, said the facility has credentialing specialists who assist physicians with their licenses and hospital credentials.Įven with the extra assistance the process can still take up to a year, Murren said. One obstacle, he said, occurred when a credentialing specialist for the Nevada Cancer Institute tried to obtain his records from UCLA’s medical school, where he was a fellow from 1979 to 1980.
Nevada board of medicine wants me to have a peer review license#
He said lawmakers plan to work with the medical board to come up with solutions, even if that means changing state laws at the upcoming Legislature.įoon applied for his medical license in early April he received it in September after navigating numerous hurdles. Hardy said lawmakers are “ready to do whatever it takes” to make a change. When that happens, it adds to the state’s physician shortage, which could impact access to care for patients of all ages, health officials say. Though Hardy and other state lawmakers and physicians agree stringent laws weed out bad doctors, they also say those laws shouldn’t prevent doctors from coming to Nevada. “If I’m someone coming off a residency with $200,000 in medical school debt, and I have an opportunity to get my medical license and start earning a living in a state within two weeks versus six to nine months, where do you think I’m going to go? Not Nevada.” It takes too long to get your medical license,”’ Hardy said. Everyone in the nation knows, ‘Don’t go to Nevada. “I thought that was a pretty quick turnaround.
Hardy, a physician himself, said he recently spoke with an ophthalmologist about his licensing experience and was told it took seven months. “I was recently licensed in Florida in half the time it took in Nevada, because they didn’t require verifications to the level required by Nevada.”Īnd Foon’s licensing experience might be considered quick compared to other physicians’, said state Sen. “The Nevada licensing experience was by far the most difficult I’ve ever gone through in my career,” said Foon, head of the leukemia section within the Department of Hematological Malignancies at the Nevada Cancer Institute. Kenneth Foon why it took him six months to prove to the Nevada State Board of Medical Examiners that he was competent enough to treat patients here and he shrugs. cancer vaccine patents, has published more than 320 articles in peer-reviewed science journals and foots a résumé that includes the University of Pittsburgh’s Cancer Institute.īut ask Dr.