Welcome
Medical Peer Review Resource is a patient safety organization ("PSO"). It is listed with the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which is a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. The primary focus of a PSO is to gather information about patient safety events and report it to a national databank for analysis. Healthcare providers can then use this information to improve quality of care. Information is first aggregated and analyzed by the PSO at a micro level; meaning, the PSO provides its provider members with patient safety data for the specific provider and comparative data for all of the PSO's provider members. Second, information sent to the national databank by all of the PSOs is aggregated and analyzed on a macro level that includes national trends and standards. Therefore, both national and local data concerning patient safety events is made available to a member of a PSO.
One of the main ways to prevent future patient safety events is to conduct peer review. Hospitals and other healthcare facilities are required to perform peer review in order to achieve accreditation status, and in some states, licensure. Thus, peer review is a mandatory activity performed by physicians at various types of healthcare facilities.
Peer review participants are granted immunity from suit and confidentiality protection under the federal Health Care Quality Improvement Act. However, this federal law does not protect the documents and recommendations that come out of a peer review committee. Almost all states have state statutes that provide confidentiality and privilege protection to the documents and recommendations that are created as a result of the peer review process.
In Florida, however, the state statutes protecting peer review privilege and confidentiality have been repealed through what is known as Amendment 7. Amendment 7 allows a patient, or potential patient, to request information about a provider regarding any adverse event. An adverse event is anything that resulted in a patient's injury, or could have resulted in a patient's injury. As you can see, Amendment 7 is very broad and allows individuals to request items such as incident reports, peer review documents, and other patient safety event information concerning a particular physician.
The PSO can provide Florida physicians and healthcare providers with protection. First, a healthcare provider that has a contract with a PSO sets up a patient safety evaluation system. The patient safety evaluation system is how the provider collects patient safety event information through activities such as incident reporting, trending (i.e. infections), root cause analysis, and peer review. Any information that is collected, created, or maintained through the patient safety evaluation system constitutes patient safety work product. Patient safety work product is collected by the PSO and reported to the national databank. Most importantly, all patient safety work product is privileged and confidential under federal law, which trumps state law, including Amendment 7.
Therefore, Medical Peer Review Resource is primarily focusing its efforts in Florida in order to allow physicians to continue to conduct meaningful peer review in order to improve patient safety. The goal is to ensure that the documents and recommendations created by the peer review committee remain privileged and confidential. Additionally, other documents that are subject to Amendment 7 requests include root cause analyses, incident reports, and patient complaints. Plaintiffs' counsel will commonly request these documents through an Amendment 7 request in medical malpractice cases. Therefore, without PSO protection, these documents make the hospital and physician vulnerable in a lawsuit as they can easily be requested by the plaintiff in a medical malpractice case.
Medical Peer Review Resource offers standard PSO services such as the collection of patient safety work product; indexing, labeling, and storage of patient safety work product; legal services; organizing peer review and other professional medical review services; reporting of information to licensure, accreditation, and certification agencies; basic training and education; and other miscellaneous services and expenses that are routinely and engaged in by patient safety organizations. Medical Peer Review Resources also offers additional services such as legal defense of all patient safety work product and Amendment 7 requests, consultants to serve as outside peer review experts, specialized consultation services, and comparison data.
Finally, most hospitals currently conduct comparative data regarding patient safety events. Florida hospitals are currently incurring legal fees with respect to Amendment 7 requests and medical malpractice cases. Most of the costs associated with Medical Peer Review Resource are anticipated to replace or reduce other legal fees and costs incurred by a hospital with respect to Amendment 7 requests and patient safety activities. The institution of a PSO and a patient safety evaluation system is also a great way to evaluate a hospital's current reporting system for patient safety events and data analysis.