State Medical Board of Ohio

About this board

The Medical Board’s mandate goes beyond initial licensure: it investigates complaints, disciplines license holders, and publishes formal actions. A physician’s record can include citations, consent agreements, probation terms, or permanent revocation — all of which appear in the public license record and matter enormously to hospitals, insurers, and patients.

Physician credentialing in Ohio typically layers this state verification on top of national sources such as the NPDB and board-certification checks. The state record answers the legal question — may this person practice medicine in Ohio today — while the national sources answer questions about history and specialty credentials. Both matter, but the state record is where practice authority actually lives.

Medical Board by the numbers

These figures are ours, not the board's — we computed them from the full State of Ohio licence file so you can see this board in context rather than one record at a time. Data as of September 2026.

Only 34.5% of the 308,325 licences this board has on record are currently active — the other 65.5% belong to people who retired, moved, changed careers, or simply let a credential lapse. That gap is the single best reason to verify a licence rather than assume a name in a database means somebody may practise today.

Most common licence types

When a licence from this board is not active, the most common reason recorded is expired (73,224 records), followed by deceased (14,828). Our status dictionary explains what each label actually means.

1.96% of this board's licences carry a recorded board action (6,052 of 308,325), against about 1.6% across all Ohio professions. A board action covers everything from an administrative consent agreement to revocation, and it is cumulative over a licence's whole life — see how we measured that before reading much into it.

Computed by OhioLicenseCheck from the State of Ohio eLicense dataset (issued licences only; application records excluded). Refreshed daily.

Who verifies these licenses?

• •Hospital medical-staff offices during initial credentialing and re-credentialing
• •Health insurers building and auditing provider networks
• •Telehealth platforms confirming Ohio practice authority before activating providers
• •Patients researching a new physician or surgeon

Verification tips

• Verify the exact license type: MD, DO, and PA records are distinct, and a PA requires a supervision agreement to practice.
• Read any listed board actions in full — a "reprimand" and a "suspension stayed under probation" are very different situations.
• For telemedicine, the physician generally must be licensed in Ohio if the patient is located in Ohio.

Renewals and expiration

Ohio physician licenses renew on a two-year cycle tied to the licensee’s birth month, with continuing medical education (CME) attestation required. Lapsed licenses move through restoration processes that get more demanding with time, so most practices track expirations closely — an automated expiry alert removes the human error from that tracking.

Frequently asked questions