Look Up a License Help

Look Up a License

Search Screen Tips
Knowing the following information will help you get the results you are looking for in an easy and efficient manner.

1) The key to remember is LESS is definitely more. The best results occur when the system receives the least amount of information. Some techniques include only providing the county where the practitioner is located or the last name or the first letter of the practitioner's name, or select a profession. You also can select search options to narrow or broaden search results. All search fields are optional.

2) Depending on your search selection and the results, you may have narrowed it down to the specific practitioner you are trying to locate. If by chance your search is broader and the results produce a list of names, review the list to find the name in question.
Once you have located the name, you will be able to click on the link (the underlined license number in the left column of the search results) and go to some basic information regarding the practitioner. For example, the name, address of record, profession, license status and etc will be displayed. At this point you can make sure that this is the right person.

3) If the licensee is one of our profiled professions, there will be a tab next to the General Information tab that is titled, "Practitioner Profile." This will take you to practitioner reported information about their education, specialty certification, etc.

Professions Included in Search Screen
All health care professions and establishments regulated by the Medical Quality Assurance Division (MQA) are included in this search screen. However, MQA does not regulate every health care profession. If the profession you are seeking is not listed in the screen's profession list, it may be that it is regulated by another area of the Department of Health. Please see our List of Regulated Professions (pdf) for assistance in locating the profession you are seeking.

About the Information Provided in the Search Screen
The Department of Health (DOH), Division of Medical Quality Assurance (MQA) identifies its licensee by a combination of the license prefix (rank code) and a number. This combination is unique to the license issued. Other identifiers are placed on the license to identify further the nature of the license and scope of practice.

Profession descriptions come from the statutes governing the license and are often vague when presented in union with all of the other license descriptions regulated by this department. For a complete listing of the rank codes and the occupation they represent, please review our listing of license prefixes (pdf).

Over the years, the length of the licensee name, business name and DBA (doing business as) name fields were restricted to 50 characters. This causes some names to end abruptly or to be severely abbreviated. Please consider this when searching for a licensee. The search on license number is always your most effective search. A licensed professional should always make his or her license number readily available to you and many professionals are required to have this information on their correspondence, business cards and advertisements.

The information you will see on this screen is current as of the date shown on the detail screen for the license, NOT the date at the bottom of the search screen. Information is extracted from our data base and then downloaded to the search screen the evening of the next business day. So information that was entered into our system on Monday will display on the Internet on Wednesday. Tuesday's information will display on Thursday, and so on.