01 · Physician license verification
How physician license verification actually works.
Physician license verification confirms, directly with the specific state medical board that issued it, that a physician's license is active and unrestricted in the state where care will be given. Nursing has Nursys, one shared lookup nearly every board reports into. Physicians have no equivalent: every state medical board runs its own separate portal, its own login, its own record, and its own answer, checked one board at a time.
Checked 13 Aug 2026 · Doc RVN-EXP-MLV
Every board is its own door.
There is no single Nursys for physicians. Every state medical board operates its own separate license lookup, with its own login, its own record, and its own definition of current. A physician licensed in several states re-proves the same medical school, the same postgraduate training, and the same disciplinary history to every board that licenses them, one door at a time, and no board's portal reads the one beside it. The register below renders that structurally: each cell is a real board, sealed, checked on its own.
FSMB's Federation Credentials Verification Service (FCVS)
A source-checked repository FSMB created in 19961, accepted or required by participating state medical and osteopathic boards. It is a portable profile a physician builds once and a participating board or hospital can pull instead of re-requesting the same documents, not a live, per-state API that any board can query on demand.
- Established
- 1996
- In use by
- Physicians and PAs, through participating state boards
- What it is
- A portable profile, not a live per-state API
A sampling, not the full set2. Every board above runs its own portal, its own login, and its own record; none of the cells shares a wall with the one beside it.
1 FSMB, Federation Credentials Verification Service, fsmb.org/fcvs, accessed 13 Aug 2026: a lifetime repository of source-checked core credentials for physicians and PAs, accepted or required by participating state medical and osteopathic boards, and a portable profile rather than a live per-state interface. Founding year 1996 per FSMB's published centennial history; FSMB does not publish a current user count. 2 State medical boards, individually operated, accessed 13 Aug 2026: each board maintains its own separate license lookup; there is no single national physician license database equivalent to nursing's Nursys.
Agent watchA per-board check is chase labor, not judgment: open a portal, enter a name, read back a status, repeat, once per state. Agents run every open board's check concurrently and assemble the results into one file, each entry receipted to the source that returned it. Reading the finished record is fast. Confirming it, board by board, is what used to take the time.
Who the one exception helps most.
International medical graduates and physicians licensed in several states are the two groups FCVS was built for. An international graduate's foreign medical school transcript, ECFMG certification, and postgraduate training records are among the hardest primary source documents to re-request state by state; FCVS collects that packet once and holds it as a portable profile a participating board or hospital can pull instead of re-requesting it from the school directly. A physician adding a fourth or fifth state license faces the same repeated request for the same education record every time; FCVS shortens that one specific request. It does not shorten anything else in the file.
FCVS is bounded on purpose. It holds education, training, and examination history; it does not hold a state's current license status, its board actions, or its DEA registration. Those still come from the state, checked at the state, every time.
One paragraph on what “verified” should mean.
Primary source verification means confirming a credential directly with the entity that issued it, an accredited medical school, a state board, a certifying board, not from a copy or transcript the physician supplies. NCQA recognizes the primary source itself, a designated equivalent source, or a contracted agent acting on the primary source's behalf; a photocopy in a folder is none of those. FCVS qualifies as that kind of source for the specific facts it holds. A state board's own confirmation of its own license is another. Neither one, by itself, is the whole credentialing file.
Read what primary source verification requiresStop re-proving the same credential to every board.
A physician's medical education does not change board to board; the request for it does, every single time. One file, checked once per source and kept current after that, answers every board's version of the same question without re-running the chase each time a new state opens a case.
See the record that stays ready