How to Verify a Doctor's or Nurse Practitioner's License

A doctor’s license isn’t a marketing claim. It’s a public record you can look up yourself, for free, in a couple of minutes. Get the clinician’s name, credential, and state, then check that state’s medical or nursing board, or a national lookup like DocInfo.org or Nursys. An NPI number alone doesn’t prove licensure, and board certification is a separate, optional credential on top of it.

Why licensing is state by state

In the US, there’s no single national medical license. Each state runs its own medical board, sets its own requirements, and licenses its own physicians, nurse practitioners, and physician assistants. A license issued in one state generally doesn’t authorize practice in another.

That matters for telehealth and online notes specifically. The Federation of State Medical Boards’ telemedicine policy states it plainly: “the practice of medicine occurs where the patient is located at the time that telemedicine technologies are used.” A physician needs to be licensed in the state where the patient is sitting, not the state where the physician happens to be working from. If a service tells you it’s “reviewed by a licensed physician” but won’t say which state, that’s a gap worth asking about.

What the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact does and doesn’t do

The Interstate Medical Licensure Compact (IMLC) is a voluntary agreement among a majority of states that speeds up licensing for physicians who already hold a full, unrestricted license and want to practice in additional member states. It does not create one national license. A physician using the compact still ends up with a separate license in each state, issued by that state’s board, and each one can still be looked up individually.

One thing worth flagging directly: the compact’s real site is imlcc.com, not imlcc.org. The commission’s own site carries a notice that it is “not affiliated with or associated with imlcc.org.” It’s a small detail, but it’s exactly the kind of mix-up that matters when you’re trying to confirm something is legitimate.

How to look up a physician’s license

Three free tools cover most of this:

Your state’s medical board. Every state licensing board runs a public verification page where you can search by name and see license status and any disciplinary history.

DocInfo.org. Run by the Federation of State Medical Boards, this searches licensure and background information for more than a million physicians and PAs across participating state boards in one place.

NPPES NPI Registry. Most clinicians also have a National Provider Identifier, a 10-digit number searchable at npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov. It’s useful for confirming a name and specialty match, but it isn’t proof of licensure on its own. CMS says so directly on the registry itself: “Issuance of an NPI does not ensure or validate that the Health Care Provider is Licensed or Credentialed.” Treat an NPI as one data point, not the whole answer.

What board certification means, and how it’s different from a license

A license is the legal minimum. It’s required to practice medicine at all, and a state can suspend or revoke it. Board certification sits on top of that: it’s a voluntary credential showing a physician completed extra training and passed exams in a specific specialty.

For MDs, board certification runs through Member Boards of the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS), and patients can check status for free at certificationmatters.org. For DOs, the equivalent path runs through the American Osteopathic Association’s certifying boards, with its own public verification tool. A physician can be fully licensed without being board-certified in a given specialty, and the reverse isn’t possible: certification assumes an underlying license already exists. If a site advertises “board-certified physicians” but gives no way to check that claim, the claim is doing more work than the evidence behind it.

Verifying nurse practitioners and physician assistants

Nurse practitioners are licensed by state boards of nursing, not medical boards. Nursys, run by the National Council of State Boards of Nursing, is the equivalent lookup tool for RNs, LPNs, and advanced practice nurses at participating state boards, with a free QuickConfirm search for license and discipline status. Physician assistants are generally covered through the same state medical board and NPI-based lookups used for physicians.

One state-specific wrinkle worth knowing: what an NP is legally allowed to do on their own varies a lot by state. The American Association of Nurse Practitioners tracks this as a “practice environment,” ranging from full practice (an NP can evaluate, diagnose, and treat independently) to reduced or restricted practice (a career-long agreement with a physician is required for at least part of the NP’s work). Scope of practice is a separate question from whether the license itself is valid, but it’s relevant if you’re trying to understand what a note from an NP represents.

What a legitimate note should show so it can be checked

A note that can be verified will show, at minimum, the clinician’s full name, their credential (MD, DO, NP, or PA), the state where they’re licensed, and either a license number or an NPI. Some form of contact information for the issuing practice matters too, since that’s what a verification call or lookup actually confirms.

If a document is missing all of that, meaning there’s no name, no credential, and no state, there’s nothing to look up. That’s the practical difference between a real note and a blank template someone filled in themselves: one points to a real, checkable license, and the other doesn’t point anywhere.

How employers can confirm a note without seeing a diagnosis

Employers are allowed to ask for a doctor’s note, and they’re allowed to contact the issuing clinic to ask whether it’s genuine, but that confirmation happens with your authorization, not automatically. HHS’s own guidance is direct about this: an employer’s request for a note is generally outside the Privacy Rule, but if the employer contacts the provider directly, “your provider cannot give your employer the information without your authorization unless other laws require them to do so.” In practice, a verification call can confirm a note is real once you authorize it. It doesn’t hand over why you were seen.

Red flags

A few signs are worth treating as disqualifying rather than minor: no clinician name anywhere on the document, a name that returns no result on the relevant state board or DocInfo.org, a license number that doesn’t match the name searched, or a site that can’t say which state its clinicians are licensed in at all. For a closer look at what these documents tend to look like in practice, see real doctor’s note vs. a template and the risks of a fake doctor’s note.

How CuroNote will handle this at launch

CuroNote is not signing or issuing notes yet. We’re in a pre-launch phase, building out the site and reserving spots ahead of a physician partner and state licensing being finalized. We’re not naming a reviewer today, because doing that before a real, credentialed clinician is in place would be exactly the kind of claim this guide is warning you to check for.

Here’s what we’re committing to instead: when CuroNote launches, every note will name the signing clinician, their credential, and their license state and number (or NPI), directly on the document, so you can run this same lookup process yourself against it. That’s not a promise you have to take on faith. It’s the same public-record system described above, applied to us.