Massachusetts ranks 38th in the incidence of “serious” disciplinary actions against doctors, according to a report released yesterday by Public Citizen. The public interest group noted that physicians in Alaska, Kentucky, and Ohio were most likely to receive sanctions by state licensing boards in 2008. Disciplinary actions were the least frequent in Minnesota, South Carolina, and Wisconsin.

(Oddly, the New York Times reported over the weekend that Minnesota leads the nation in tracking food-related illnesses, and we already knew that Minnesota ranked first in voter turnout and in contested legislative races. It’s kind of reassuring to see the Gopher State finish last in something.)

According to Public Citizen, there were 67 disciplinary actions (i.e., “revocations, surrenders, suspensions and probation/restrictions”) against Massachusetts doctors last year, out of some 34,000 physicians licensed to practice in the state. In Ohio, which has about 39,000 doctors, there were 205 disciplinary actions.

Could it be that doctors in Massachusetts are simply more competent than those in Ohio? Public Citizen is guessing “no,” and it speculates that not enough doctors are getting slapped anywhere in the US:

Absent any evidence that the prevalence of physicians deserving of discipline varies substantially from state to state, this variability must be considered the result of the boards’ practices. Indeed, the ability of certain states to rapidly increase or decrease their rankings (even when these are calculated on the basis of three-year averages) can only be due to changes in practices at the board level; the prevalence of physicians eligible for discipline cannot change so rapidly.

Moreover, there is considerable evidence that most boards are under-disciplining physicians. For example, in a report on doctors disciplined for criminal activity that we published recently, 67 percent of insurance fraud convictions and 36 percent of convictions related to controlled substances were associated with only non-severe discipline by the board.[