Creating a committee for AHPs

If you are struggling with questions related to AHP peer review, privileging, and other medical staff functions, forming an AHP committee may be the answer. Cindy Radcliffe, CPMSM, director of medical staff services at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, California, shares how her AHP committee approaches peer review.

To develop the committee’s role in peer review, the key players—key medical staff leaders, medical staff services, and the clinical excellence department—had several pre-meetings. They decided to create a core group—one AHP from each specialty represented at the hospital by NPs and PAs. This includes:

• A PA from emergency medicine
• A PA from cardiovascular medicine
• An NP from orthopedics (representing surgery)
• An NP from medicine

This core group is responsible for conducting peer review through chart review. They will review a combination of random charts and ones that come through via the incident reporting system. Like the peer review process for medical staff members, the charts are pre-screened by the peer review manager, who is a registered nurse, and who does a write-up and passes it along to the core group of the allied health committee. The core group will review it and decide whether the standard of care was met. The core group can then decide whether it wants to discuss the case as a larger group at the allied health committee meeting.

Source: Medical Staff Briefing