In the face of determined opposition from many doctors, and in a break with its own overly passive past, the N.C. Medical Board has moved to give the public a better view of the mistakes that doctors sometimes make.

But there's been a load of compromisin' on the road to this particular horizon. And even the progress made this week is subject to further scaling back. The public will have to be vigilant to preserve these gains.

The board, a state agency that licenses and regulates more than 20,000 doctors and physician assistants, voted Wednesday to set up a Web site that will show most medical malpractice payouts, listed by doctor. The site will also report whether the legal action led to discipline for the doctor.

However, the information that will be provided falls short of what the board's staff had proposed to offer in their efforts to better protect the public from those doctors who may be prone to mistakes.

The N.C. Medical Society, malpractice insurers and defense lawyers complained that posting all malpractice payments going back seven years, as the Medical Board intended, would be unfair and possibly illegal. The board's staff countered that about 25 other states have similar provisions -- a strong argument for openness.

In voting to set up the new Web site (it starts next year), Medical Board members agreed to meet the doctors somewhere in-between. Only those settlements exceeding $25,000 will be listed. And while there's still a seven-year time frame, it will run forward from October 2007, rather than extend back. So at startup there'll be comparatively little settlement information to post.

Even that may be too much for the doctors, who say they're mulling over an appeal to the state Rules Review Commission and ultimately the legislature.

Considering that it would be in service of lawsuit secrecy clauses and of withholding information from patients, such an appeal would not be calculated to increase the public's well-being.