Most people never check whether their doctor is licensed. It’s a reasonable assumption — hospitals and medical groups verify credentials before anyone sees a patient. But there are good reasons to look anyway: you’ve been referred to someone new, a name came up in a news story, a practice changed hands, or you simply want to know a little more about the person you’re trusting with your health. In New York, it takes about five minutes, it’s free, and you don’t need to create an account anywhere.
Here’s how to do it, and what each source can and can’t tell you.
Start with the state license
Physicians in New York are licensed by the State Education Department, through its Office of the Professions. The office runs an online license verification search that covers physicians and almost every other licensed health profession — dentists, psychologists, licensed clinical social workers, mental health counselors, chiropractors, optometrists, physical therapists, podiatrists and nurse practitioners among them.
Search by name and choose the profession. The result shows the license number, the date the license was first issued, and whether the person is currently registered to practice. That last part matters: a New York license is permanent, but a professional has to re-register every few years to actually practice. A license with a lapsed registration means the person isn’t currently authorized to practice in the state.
The license number shown there is the same one you’ll see on many ProVerdicts profiles, listed as “NY license no.” — so you can match the two.
Look for discipline
For physicians, misconduct is handled not by the Education Department but by the Department of Health’s Office of Professional Medical Conduct. Its public actions — license surrenders, suspensions, probation, fines — can be searched on the Department of Health website. No result is good news. A result isn’t automatically a reason to avoid someone, but read it: the documents explain what happened and what the board decided.
New York also publishes a physician profile for every licensed doctor, which physicians are required to keep up to date. It can include education, board certifications, hospital privileges, the insurance plans they participate in, and certain legal actions and malpractice payments. It’s self-reported in parts, but it’s an official record.
Check board certification separately
A license means a doctor is allowed to practice medicine. Board certification is something else: it means they completed training in a specialty and passed that specialty board’s exams, and in most cases keep up ongoing requirements. It isn’t legally required, but most specialists have it, and many hospitals require it.
For MDs and many DOs, the American Board of Medical Specialties offers a free lookup at CertificationMatters.org. Osteopathic physicians may instead be certified by the American Osteopathic Association’s specialty boards, which have their own verification.
Use the NPI to confirm you have the right person
Common names are a real problem. There may be several doctors named John Murphy in New York, and more than one of them in Erie County. The National Provider Identifier — a ten-digit number every billing health professional has — is the way to keep them apart. You can look it up in the federal NPI Registry, and it appears on each clinician’s ProVerdicts profile. If the NPI, the specialty and the practice address all line up, you have the right person. (We explain more in what an NPI number is and isn’t.)
What none of these tell you
Official records answer one question well: is this person qualified and in good standing? They say very little about the things patients actually notice — whether the doctor listens, how long it takes to get an appointment, whether the office calls you back. That’s where reviews from other patients come in, and why we built ProVerdicts around individual doctors rather than buildings. If you’ve seen a doctor in Buffalo, you can find them in our doctor listings and share what it was like.
