Who this affects
Arrest records and medical licences
Texas requires your state-run public physician profile to describe charges resolved by deferred adjudication or pretrial diversion — the exact dispositions designed to avoid a conviction — and refreshes it from a continuous national databank query within ten working days.
The state publishes the non-conviction
Tex. Occ. Code § 154.006 requires the physician profile to include a description of any charges reported to the board to which the physician pleaded no contest, for which the physician is the subject of deferred adjudication or pretrial diversion, or in which sufficient facts of guilt were found — alongside felony and Class A/B convictions.
The same section requires the board to run a continuous query on the National Practitioner Data Bank and update the profile not later than the tenth working day after new information is found. It is a government page about you that updates itself.
California publishes at an earlier stage still: the Medical Board posts accusations — the formal charging document beginning the disciplinary process — on the public profile.
The reporting deadlines run from indictment
California B&P § 802.1 requires a physician to report the bringing of an indictment or information charging a felony, in writing, within 30 days — not the conviction, the charge. Failure is a public offence punishable by a fine up to $5,000. Texas rule 22 TAC § 173.3 requires reporting within 30 days of the event, feeding the profile above. Arizona gives ten working days from the charge. Florida allows 30 days and reaches pleas regardless of adjudication.
Hospitals are obliged to look. Under 45 CFR § 60.17 a hospital must query the National Practitioner Data Bank when a practitioner applies for medical staff appointment or clinical privileges, and every two years thereafter — and a hospital that fails to query is presumed to have knowledge of whatever the NPDB held.
DEA registration asks a question most people miss: Form 224 asks whether the applicant has ever been convicted of a controlled-substance crime or whether any such action is pending.
What is left for removal work
Not the profile, not the NPDB, not the accusation. Those are statutory and confidential-or-public by rule, and no service can alter them.
What is left is substantial anyway: patients do not read the state profile, they search your name. Ratings sites, aggregator copies of a booking record, and news coverage are what surface, and those are removable or suppressible on the ordinary terms described elsewhere on this site. Handle the reporting deadline with counsel first — 30 days from indictment is not long — and the search results after.
The prosecutor tells the board first
In California this is not a risk, it is a statutory duty owed by someone else. The district attorney or prosecuting agency must notify the applicable healing arts board immediately on obtaining information that a defendant is a licensee, identifying the licensee and describing the charges and the facts alleged. The clerk of the court must transmit a certified copy of any record of conviction within 48 hours. Whatever the reporting deadline on you, do not plan around the board not finding out.
What the board must then publish is defined by statute and is narrower than most people assume. The list runs to restraining and interim suspension orders, revocations, suspensions, probation, practice limitations, public letters of reprimand, citations and fines, certain malpractice settlements and arbitration awards, hospital privilege terminations, and felony convictions. A pending charge is not on it.
Which leaves a specific gap. For a physician whose case has not produced discipline, the arrest is usually visible in exactly one place — the search result under your name — and that is the part removal work can reach.
Common questions
Can the profile entry be removed?
No. Tex. Occ. Code § 154.006 requires the content, and the board updates it from a continuous NPDB query. A service offering to remove it is describing something it cannot do.
Does a dismissal keep it off?
Not necessarily in Texas, where deferred adjudication and pretrial diversion are expressly reportable to the profile. That is the point of the provision.
What should I do first?
Check your reporting deadline. California runs 30 days from the indictment, Arizona ten working days from the charge. Search results can wait a week; a statutory deadline cannot.
Try the free route first
Google removes your home address, phone number, email and — since February 2026 — government ID numbers at no cost. More than 10 million people have used it. It does not cover arrest records, and it will not touch a government or newspaper page, but it is free and it is worth running first.
Open Google’s Results about you tool
Sources
- Tex. Occ. Code § 154.006
- Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 802.1
- 45 CFR § 60.17 — hospital querying requirement
- Medical Board of California — license verification sample
- A.R.S. § 32-3208
- 21 CFR § 1301.76
- Cal. B&P Code §803.5 — prosecutor and clerk duties
- Cal. B&P Code §803.1 — what the board must disclose
Every claim on this page traces to the sources above, checked on 2026-08-25. Rules in this area change — several of the ones on this page changed in the last three years. If you find something here that is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
