Partnering With Health Lawyers

With increased pressures on hospitals to improve patient safety and quality, all eyes are on the credentialing and peer review processes to improve practitioner transparency and accountability. Aspiring to reach these goals requires raising pre-established standards of safety and quality—a measure recently taken by the Joint Commission (TJC). The new focused and ongoing professional practice evaluations (FPPE and OPPE) standards call for hospitals to make unbiased credentialing and privileging decisions based on physician performance, thus strengthening and extending the peer review process.

In addition to these updates, a new trend of allotting the discoverability of peer review is establishing itself in many states. Florida, for example, instituted a constitutional amendment to the Health Care Quality Improvement Act of 1986 that requires health care providers to allow health care consumers access to information about an “adverse medical incident.” These incidents are defined as “medical negligence, intentional misconduct, or any other act, neglect of default of a health care facility or health care provider that caused or could have caused an injury or death of a patient.”

As a healthcare attorney, you have a trusted advisor role with your Hospital and ASC clients. At AllMed, our job is to help you help your clients. Incorporating external peer review into hospital practitioner performance evaluations can be an effective method of improving the quality of the review process and limiting litigation risk. Peer review in the hospital setting is an activity that raises liability and litigation concerns to an ever-increasing degree. It is here that AllMed partners with top law firms and in-house counsel to help them improve the credentialing and peer review process at client hospitals.

AllMed offers external peer review services, access to our consulting and training network, and provides up-to-date information and best practices. These services are designed to help you advise and resolve your client’s legally and politically sensitive situations including review of sentinel events to gain clarity on the best path to case resolution; resolving conflict-of-interest situations; and performing focused and ongoing reviews as a part of credentialing and privileging, in accordance with the new TJC standards.