OPTOMETRY — Physician Discipline Data

What the OPTOMETRY Discipline Data Reveals

OPTOMETRY ranks #0 out of 0 specialties for physician discipline rate, with N/A serious actions per 1,000 licensed physicians. That rate is derived from 81 formal disciplinary actions taken against N/A optometry physicians in the United States — meaning roughly 0.1% of all physician discipline in the country involves this specialty. Compared to the national average of 10.19 per 1,000, OPTOMETRY sits below the overall physician workforce baseline, placing it in the lower-incidence half of the specialty landscape.

Specialty-level discipline rates reflect regulatory exposure more than clinical quality. Specialties with heavy controlled-substance prescribing (pain management, psychiatry, addiction medicine), elevated malpractice exposure (surgery, obstetrics), or concentrated billing-fraud risk (some procedural and telehealth fields) consistently appear at higher rates because they generate more complaints and more board investigations per capita. A lower-than-average rate in OPTOMETRY therefore tells patients what kind of oversight pressure the specialty faces — not whether an individual optometry physician is safe. Recent federal exclusions in this specialty include 10 providers spanning multiple states and exclusion categories.

For patients choosing a optometry provider, the takeaway is to verify the specific physician — not judge the specialty. Use the state medical board's license lookup for current status and any disciplinary orders, the FSMB DocInfo service for multi-state history, and the HHS OIG LEIE for federal exclusion checks. Rate statistics like N/A per 1,000 are useful context for understanding enforcement patterns at the specialty level, but personal verification is the only way to confirm that a particular provider is currently eligible to practice and bill federal programs.