Court ruling weakens physician peer review
Sacramento Business Journal
This month's ruling by the California Supreme Court undercutting the confidentiality of physician peer review records in hospitals is unfortunate.
If left to stand without legislative correction, it will erode the quality of medical care Californians can expect from their doctors.
The court ruling gives state agencies access to peer review records previously held to be confidential.
The problem is that now, state bureaucrats who often must go head-to-head with hospitals and physicians in bitter arguments over policy interpretation, are suddenly entrusted with documents that any ambulance-chasing lawyer would love to have in a malpractice suit.
While the notion of doctors policing themselves causes some to sense conspiracy, peer review, in fact, is an excellent system for ensuring quality. Other professions would benefit from it.
Behind closed doors and with certain confidentiality, a community's doctors can be as tough with each other as they need to be to ensure good medicine is being practiced. They critique each other's work, and in so doing, they improve each other's work. Often, they take action, right up to suspending or revoking hospital privileges. Particularly in the era of managed care, when doctors and hospitals are joined at the financial hip by the need to keep communities healthy, peer review works.
And who better to critique the work of a doctor than another doctor? Certainly not malpractice attorneys.
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