Michelle Mello, JD, PhD, a professor of law and health policy at Stanford University, has studied the current applications of the NPDB. In 2019, she published an article in The New England Journal of Medicine examining changes in practice patterns for clinicians who faced multiple malpractice claims. Mello questioned what benefit consumers would get from direct access to the NPDB’s information. “It provides almost no context for the information it reports, making it even harder for patients to make sense of what they see there,” Mello told Medscape.