Finding a doctor in Maine can feel overwhelming, as many people struggle to find a primary care physician amid months-long waitlists.
That decision has also become scarier following a recent string of high-profile medical malpractice cases in the state.
Last month, a jury awarded $17 million to a Skowhegan woman whose doctor mistakenly removed her bladder, and a Bangor doctor was sued for operating on the wrong limb — a mistake he’d already made on another patient seven years earlier.
High-profile verdicts in cases like these have left some Mainers wondering how they should research their doctors and protect themselves from medical errors. And for those who have struggled to find a doctor in Maine, they may wonder how they know if they’ve found the right one for their needs.
“Picking a doctor in 2026 is complicated,” Mara Gordon, a New Jersey-based family physician and author of NPR’s Real Talk With a Doc column, told the Bangor Daily News.
If you’re searching for a new doctor and want some peace of mind, here’s what you can do.
Start with word of mouth
Start your search for a medical provider with old-fashioned word of mouth, Gordon said. Ask people in your community for recommendations and include follow up questions to determine what specifically they like about those doctors.
“If you share values with your friends and family and neighbors, then that can often be a good way to point you in the right direction of a doctor who might share those values too,” she said, adding that she thinks good rapport with your doctor is more important than credentials like where they went to school or how many publications they have.
Research online
Once you have candidates in mind for your medical care, there are several places you can look online to learn more about them, starting with a simple Google search. This is the best way to learn if the provider has been the subject of a malpractice lawsuit, as accusations that progressed to that level likely would have been reported by local newspapers.
For best results, try searching for the doctor’s name along with any hospitals or cities where they’ve worked, and click on the “news” tab to see if they’ve appeared in any news reports.
Biographical pages on hospital websites can also give you a sense of a provider’s experience and areas of expertise.
In Maine, you can use an online state database to review the licenses of medical professionals.
Using the state’s “Regulatory Licensing and Permitting” portal, click “search individuals.” There you can type in the doctor’s last and first names and perform a search. Set the regulator field to “all” since some professions, such as nurses and doctors of osteopathic medicine, won’t be included in the “medicine” category.
Once you find the person you’re looking for, you can click on their name to view the status of their medical license. If a doctor is certified in a specialty by the American Board of Medical Specialties, you’ll be able to see details on this page.
Any disciplinary actions by the state medical board will also be displayed here. Keep in mind that this won’t show disciplinary actions taken in other states. Maine recommends using the website DocInfo to check elsewhere.
Be skeptical of online patient reviews
While there are plenty of other websites that purport to have rankings and reviews showing the best and worst doctors, patients should be wary of online reviews, according to Gordon.
“I think most doctors take those with a grain of salt,” she said, adding that it’s hard “to really assess a doctor’s competence, their values, their ethics, their bedside manner based on one review.”
Conflict is a part of medicine, Gordon said, and sometimes people can get frustrated and post a review that isn’t truly representative of the doctor’s competence.
Unlike businesses reviewed on sites like Yelp, medicine is “not a customer service industry,” Gordon said.
“We often are not offering people something that they really want in the same way that you buy a slice of pizza or buy an ice cream cone.”
Get copies of your medical records
“Perhaps the simplest thing that patients can do to try and protect against preventable medical errors is to look at their records,” Elizabeth Kayatta, a lawyer with the Maine-based firm Berman and Simmons, said.
Kayatta has worked on medical malpractice cases for more than a decade and said she thinks in every case she’s worked on, there’s been some kind of error or misunderstanding in the medical record.
And while most medical errors Kayatta sees “come down to factors that were beyond the patient’s control,” there are best practices patients can follow to protect themselves.
For example, sometimes details from a patient’s appointments or medical history can become less accurate as information is relayed between multiple people before it’s written down. These mistakes could become more common as some medical providers start using artificial intelligence-based charting tools, Kayatta said.
It can be a pain to set up online patient portals, but it’s worth it, she added, because monitoring your own records can help you catch mistakes.
Once you have those records, you should download or print them and keep them on hand, because different medical providers don’t always share records with each other, Kayatta said.
“Never assume that information, treatment, medications, diagnoses you’ve had at one place are going to translate over and be on the radar of providers anywhere else,” she said.
Information sharing will be more seamless if you choose a doctor within a health system you’ve already used before, according to Gordon. She recommended bringing your medications and copies of your records to appointments with a new doctor in case they don’t have access to all of your information.
Kayatta also encouraged patients to repeat themselves to every new person they interact with in a medical setting.
“I always tell people, don’t assume anyone wrote down or remembers what you just said over the phone, or at the last appointment, or even the person who was just in the room with you five minutes ago.”
You should be especially conscious of this at “red flag” times like holidays, weekends, nights and shift changes, Kayatta said.
Shop around
Gordon’s final piece of advice: don’t be afraid to get a second opinion. You can make an introductory appointment with a doctor and get to know them a little and then decide to change your mind.
Something like a wrong-site surgery is rare and represents a failure of the system, not just the individual doctor, she said. But what’s more common is for patients to feel rushed, dismissed or like they’re not being taken seriously.
“I think individual relationships really matter, and that you should trust your gut when you are getting to know a new potential doctor,” she said. “You should feel empowered to go to other ones too if it doesn’t feel like a good fit.”