Nashville doctor loses medical license due to shady prescriptions

• Dr. Kristin Dobay, a Nashville OB-GYN, secretly prescribed his girlfriend more than 900 pills.
• Dobay wrote an opioid prescription 13 times more powerful than the limit recommended by the CDC.

A Nashville-area doctor has surrendered his medical license after he was caught writing large, unjustified prescriptions of addictive drugs to at least five people — including his girlfriend — according to a recent ruling of the Tennessee Board Medical Examiners.

Dr. Kristin Josef Dobay, an OB-GYN, wrote the prescriptions while working at Patient Centered Care, an addiction treatment facility in Mount Juliet, the board found.

However, none of the prescription recipients were actually patients at the rehab center, board documents state, and Dobay was fired after the prescriptions were discovered. Board documents describe prescriptions with obvious red flags, including: 

• Dobay secretly used the name of another medical provider to prescribe his girlfriend more than 900 pills, including Ritalin, gabapentin and clonazepam;
• Dobay gave another person a prescription for opioid painkillers that was more than 13 times stronger than the maximum strength recommended by the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention;
• And Dobay prescribed 570 pills — mostly Adderall — to an administrative employee of the rehab center. That employee later admitted they were re-selling the drugs for profit, the board documents state.

The administrative employee who admitted to selling documents is not identified in public documents. Patient Centered Care could not be reached for comment. Dobay's attorney, Robert Turner, did not respond to a request for comment. 

Dobay worked at Saint Thomas Midtown and TriStar Centennial Medical Center as recently as last year but lost his hospital privileges after being arrested for a DUI in Kentucky in December, board documents state.

Dobay's prescriptions were revealed by a monthly medical discipline report from the Tennessee Department of Health, which maintains public records on licenses for doctors, nurses, chiropractors and other health care professionals throughout the state. More than 50 disciplinary actions were included in the latest report.

Brett Kelman is the health care reporter for The Tennessean. He can be reached at 615-259-8287 or at brett.kelman@tennessean.com. Follow him on Twitter at @brettkelman.