Credentialing & Peer Review Legal Insider, August 2014

Although telemedicine has the potential to make access to care simpler and easier, healthcare experts and telemedicine advocates still have concerns that regulatory obstacles are preventing the industry from reaching its full potential, while raising legal questions for both hospitals and physicians.

On Wednesday, July 9, HCPro hosted a webcast entitled "Assessing and Managing Clinically Suspect Practitioners: From Collegial Intervention to Corrective Action." During the 90-minute webcast, Todd Sagin, MD, JD, national medical director of Sagin Healthcare Consulting, LLC, and HG Healthcare Consultants, LLC, in Laverock, Pennsylvania, discussed effective ways to address physician competency, as well as some of the liability concerns that accompany these medical staff decisions.

     
The Court of Appeals of Ohio in the Eighth Appellate District, County of Cuyahoga (the "Court"), affirmed the grant by a lower court of a patient's motion to compel production of an incident report prepared after the patient suffered injuries in a hospital. The Court ruled that the incident report was not generated exclusively for peer review, and was therefore not protected from discovery under Ohio law.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (the "Court"), in an unpublished opinion, affirmed a district court's grant of summary judgment to a hospital facing claims of racial discrimination from a physician. The Court ruled that the physician failed to establish that the hospital's reason for terminating his staff privileges was pretextual or that there was a "convincing mosaic" of circumstantial evidence that would allow a jury to infer intentional discrimination.
 

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