After scare, Lynchburg dentist reups expired license

Looking back, Dr. Bland Massie says that when he attempted to renew his dental license online for the first time in 2006, he must have done something wrong.

He didn’t notice it then, but the error captured his attention in October 2007 when the Virginia Dental Association, a private professional group, gave him a call to ask why he’d sent in membership dues when the state Board of Dentistry listed his license as expired in 2006.

“‘What?’” said the astonished Massie, who has practiced dentistry in Lynchburg since 1990, was practicing at that time, and still is.

“I immediately called the Board of Dentistry. And they said this is what you’re going to need to do … because it’s been over a year, you basically have to go through the reinstatement process.”

That discovery was the beginning of more than a year of anxiety for Massie as he gathered the information needed to get his license reinstated and also dealt with inquiries about the expired license from several sources, including patients and a major dental insurer.

A number of anonymous mailings about his license status had gone out to him, The News & Advance, the Board of Dentistry and the Investigator for the Department of Health Professions.

His license had lapsed, said Massie, because of an administrative error; it had not been revoked. He hadn’t harmed a patient, he was a dentist in good standing, and he had not failed to meet criteria for renewing his license. No disciplinary action has been taken against him.

Sandra Reen, executive director of the Virginia Board of Dentistry, said she is unable to discuss a specific case unless it becomes public information following a disciplinary action and that “all investigation activity is confidential.”

When the first anonymous mailing arrived — a printout of the Department of Health Professions License Lookup Web page with Massie’s name and expired license status — it was about four days after he’d learned of it himself.

“I’m so thankful I had already notified the board,” said Massie. He then learned that the Board of Dentistry and the Investigator for the Department of Health Professions also had received mailings.

Massie began getting calls from some of his patients when their insurer notified them that they would not pay any claims until his license was reinstated.

“I had to explain the whole situation to them,” he said. He likened it to being like a longtime driver who failed to renew his driver’s license.

“To my knowledge I haven’t lost any of those patients,” he said.

When the license renewal system went online, he said, he wasn’t computer savvy. “Two years ago I was just really basically only doing e-mails. I spent my time with patients, I don’t spend my time with the keyboard.”

But he accepts that he “should have been expecting to see the license in the mail, and when I didn’t receive it in a timely fashion, I should have inquired and avoided some of this problem. All I would have had to have done at that point was pay a late fee.”

“I get inundated with so much mail, I didn’t notice it hadn’t come in.”

The Board of Dentistry sends out a license renewal notice but does not send a reminder or query if the license is not renewed. And, because the license was not renewed, no reminder was sent to Massie the following year.

And that’s how Massie ended up practicing in Lynchburg with an expired license from 2006 through 2007 and into early 2008.

To gain reinstatement, Massie has had to document his dental career since his graduation with a Doctor of Dental Medicine in Georgia before he came to Lynchburg. He’s had to document from national databases that he’s never been in trouble anywhere in the U.S., and prove he had the required number of continuing educational credits in 2006, 2007 and 2008 — not just that he was in attendance, but information about course content. Much of the information required had to be notarized.

It was a lengthy and detailed process, but it was successful. His license bears a March 2009 expiration date.

Massie, who was willing to discuss his story with The News & Advance but did not want a photo taken, said he wants other licensed professionals in dentistry, and other fields, to know how time-consuming and stressful it is to go back for reinstatement for a lapsed license.

The state had about 5,600 licensed dentists at the end of the last biennium.

Asked if other dentists had problems when enrolling online began, Reen of the Virginia Board of Dentistry said license renewal online is done through the Department of Health Professions.

Information on expired dental licenses “is not a data element” that her office can collect, she said. “Some don’t renew,” she said. “There’s no way for our data system to intuit why someone didn’t renew their license.”

No disciplinary action has been taken against Massie for the time period in which he was practicing without a valid license, nor was notification made to the Lynchburg-area community during that time.

However, even when dentists have serious charges against them, no notice is issued about it to the area in which the dentist practices, Reen said. “The public notification would be the posting of the order of suspension on our Web page.”

No spokesman for the Department of Health Professions could be reached for comment.

As for Massie, when he saw the on the Web page in April that the reinstatement had taken place, “I won’t deny the fact I was extremely relieved, and I felt like a lot of pressure was off me once I knew this was resolved.”