Iowa’s licensing boards shut off access to information on charges

The Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals and Licensing handles administrative duties for 30 state licensing boards. (Photo illustration main photo by Getty Images, logo and documents courtesy State of Iowa)

The state of Iowa says it will not necessarily disclose to the public the rationale for disciplinary charges against licensed professionals such as physicians, nurses, therapists and nursing home administrators.

The determining factor appears to be whether the state’s licensing boards choose to include the allegations within the text of a final order in a disciplinary case. If a board opts to omit those allegations from the final order, the public may never know what gave rise to the charges.

The result is that Iowa’s licensing boards are now, in some cases, keeping secret the alleged misconduct that is tied to charges of professional incompetence, ethical violations, patient abuse and even criminal convictions.

Over the past three years, public access to information from Iowa’s licensing boards has been greatly restricted. Prior to October 2021, all state licensing boards publicly disclosed charges against practitioners at the time they were filed or at the time the practitioners were notified of the charges.

That disclosure included not just the charges themselves — which are often vague, such “professional incompetence” or “unethical conduct” — but also the specific underlying conduct that gave rise to the charges, such as a botched surgery or the theft of patient medications.

In October 2021, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that the basic facts and circumstances surrounding disciplinary action against licensed professionals must be kept confidential at least until the licensing boards issue their final rulings in the matter – a process that sometimes takes years.

The court’s decision was based on a statute that says “investigative information” gathered as part of a complaint against a licensee must be kept confidential at least until the board issues its final decision. The court concluded that the basic facts and circumstances surrounding a case are “investigative” in nature.

In the aftermath of the court’s decision, most of Iowa’s licensing boards began issuing redacted statements of charges to keep secret the facts and circumstances of the cases until the cases were closed. Last fall, however, some boards took the position that the basic facts and circumstances that triggered the charges should remain sealed from public view even after a case was finalized.

For example, the Iowa Board of Nursing repeatedly refused a request from Iowa Capital Dispatch for an unredacted copy of the written statement of charges against a nurse whose license has been revoked. The redacted portion of that document outlines the specific conduct that led to the charges against the nurse.

In a Board of Chiropractic case involving Bruce Lindberg, the board resolved the case with a settlement calling for Lindberg to surrender his license. The basic facts and circumstances in that case remained sealed until an Open Records Law request was filed by the Iowa Capital Dispatch.

That request led to the unredacted version of the statement of charges being published on the website of the Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals & Licensing, which oversees many of the state’s licensing boards.

Last fall, DIAL attributed widespread inconsistency on public disclosure by the various licensing boards to the agency having taken over their administration just a few months before in July 2023. Prior to that, the boards were overseen by four different state agencies.

“The goal of DIAL has been to standardize, modernize and simplify its processes in order to promote best practices across the entire department and provide Iowans great service,” a DIAL spokesperson said last fall. “The department is working closely with the attorney general’s office to ensure all information is timely and accurately provided to the public in accordance with Iowa law.”

Details in sex case kept secret

Earlier this week, the Capital Dispatch asked DIAL for an unredacted copy of the June 2023 statement of charges the Board of Massage Therapy issued against Abelardo Rodriguez in June 2023, noting that the board’s final order in the case was issued several months ago in December 2023.

DIAL spokesperson Diane McCool refused the request, stating that while Iowa law allows for the disclosure of investigative information as part of the “final findings” in a case, the original statement of charges in a case remains a separate document from the final findings, and so any investigative information in the statement of charges will be kept confidential.

DIAL’s position seems to be at odds with some boards’ practice of incorporating the original, unredacted statement of charges into the final order of a case as either an attachment or an exhibit. In the Rodriguez case, for example, the final order specifically states that the factual circumstances in the original statement of charges “are hereby incorporated into this order, attached as Exhibit A.”

Despite that language in the final order, DIAL is refusing make public the exhibit with the details of Rodriguez’s alleged wrongdoing.

Court records suggest the board’s action against Rodriguez is based in part on criminal charges that date back to 2012 and 2016. The court documents indicate that in September 2015, a woman complained to Iowa City police that Rodriguez had been sending her unwanted messages on Facebook, as well as “multiple lewd photos of himself.” On Nov. 30, 2015, he allegedly came into the victim’s place of employment and exposed himself to her on two different occasions.

The case resulted in Rodriguez pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of harassment. Rodriguez then obtained a massage therapy license from the state, and last year the board charged Rodriguez with improper sexual contact with a client, engaging in unethical conduct, fraud in procuring a license and engaging in conduct that subverts or attempts to subvert a board investigation.

Other information kept secret by Iowa boards

McCool said DIAL’s refusal to disclose the facts and circumstances in the Rodriguez case are based on advice from legal counsel and consultation with the Iowa Public Information Board and attorney general’s office.

She did not respond to the Capital Dispatch’s request for a copy of the advice given by DIAL’s legal counsel, nor did she respond to a question about why the various licensing boards have taken different approaches to disclosure.

In recent months, some of the boards under DIAL’s control have taken to not only keeping secret the facts and circumstances in their statements of charges, but also the terms of board agreements to reinstate licenses.

In April, for example, the Iowa Board of Chiropractic ordered Todd Miedema of Sheldon to halt his practice. In the board order documenting Miedema’s agreement to immediately stop practicing, the board laid out the specific conditions under which it would consider reinstating Miedema’s license — all of which were redacted from public view.

Other states disclose more than Iowa

Historically, Iowa’s licensing boards have tended to disclose far less information on licensees’ alleged wrongdoing than is common practice in other states.

For example, in 2022 the Iowa Board of Physician Assistants publicly charged Jon Eason Perry with being subject to some form of undisclosed discipline by the licensing board of another, unspecified state. The Iowa board didn’t report any of the underlying allegations against Perry.

For almost a year, however, New Mexico’s Board of Medicine had treated the allegations against Perry as a matter of public record. The New Mexico board publicly reported “credible evidence” that Perry had grabbed a female patient’s buttocks in a sexual manner, told her she should have his child, called himself a “whore,” stated that he was cheating on his wife because she couldn’t satisfy his sexual needs, and asked to see the patient’s vagina. Perry was also accused of telling another patient he wanted to have sex with her in his office and of encouraging her to leave her husband.

The Iowa board disclosed none of that information when it filed charges against Perry, and by the time it took action in the case, Perry’s Iowa license had been expired for six months.

On June 26, the Capital Dispatch wrote to DIAL Director Larry Johnson to point out that accessing information from any of Iowa’s licensing board is now based on a “convoluted” system that requires citizens and the media to first check an online database of all licensing board actions, and then take information from that database, such as a case number, and plug it into a search engine for a separate licensing board database or, in some cases, a search engine for various state government records.

In the letter, Capital Dispatch said that process has been further hampered by inconsistencies in data entry within the various databases; the lack of dates assigned to some cases, which makes impossible to tell whether they’re new or old; and the reluctance of some boards to disclose even the redacted versions of their statements of charges.

DIAL has acknowledged receipt of the letter but has yet to respond to the issues raised.

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