Readers informed us about the case. One of them even undertook a small online investigation. The report from the reader was alarming:
When can I come by with a very interesting story concerning someone from the city who stole someone else’s professional license, is not a doctor, pretends to be one and accepts patients as a doctor?
This concerns a specialist named Aleksandra from Bolesławiec, who was listed on the ZnanyLekarz.pl platform as a “child psychiatrist.” The woman does not have this specialty. Aleksandra was also listed with a professional license number (PWZ) which, in the search engine of the Supreme Medical Chamber, belongs to an anaesthesiologist and member of the Silesian Medical Chamber in Katowice. The first name and surname matched, but Aleksandra was not the woman from Silesia. She only had identical personal details.
We contacted the Bolesławiec specialist’s employer with questions about the case. In a conversation with us, the employer stressed that his colleague had fallen victim to a perfidious fraud and declared that he would arrange for the profile to be removed and report that it contained false data. Several days after the conversation, the Bolesławiec specialist’s account was deleted, which was also confirmed by the user support representative of the ZnanyLekarz platform.
The ZnanyLekarz platform advertises itself as a global healthcare booking platform operating in 13 countries and having a database of more than two million doctors, specialists and medical facilities.
– As for profile verification on our service, it is based on our internal guidelines. Nevertheless, we are aware that a certain number of profiles verified under the old rules still remain on the service. They are undergoing gradual re-verification – Jakub Smęt, the user support representative on the platform, informed us.
This confirms that the system for verifying specialist accounts on ZnanyLekarz is easy to manipulate. For professions in which public registers exist that make it possible to check the right to practise, all one has to do is provide the professional license number and, in practice, anyone can create a profile.
Thanks to information from readers, we can warn ZnanyLekarz users that doctors’ and specialists’ accounts may not contain genuine data.