PORTLAND, Ore., April 5 /PRNewswire/ — The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) standards for 2007 have broadened the need for hospitals to use external peer review, according to Dr. Skip Freedman, Executive Medical Director at AllMed Healthcare Management, a national Independent Review Organization (IRO).
Peer review is an internal process by which hospitals assure that its doctors are competent and well trained enough to safely treat patients and provide the best quality of care. Hospitals turn to unbiased third parties like IROs to evaluate cases involving sentinel events and doctor errors; particularly when internal conflicts of interest preclude an objective evaluation by a hospital’s own peer review committee.
For 2007, the JCAHO defines two types of reviews aimed at assuring physician competence: “focused professional practice evaluation” (MS.4.30) and “ongoing professional practice evaluation” (MS.4.40). “Both standards broaden the idea of peer review to areas beyond the peer review committee and accordingly extend the use of external peer review too,” he said.
MS.4.30 covers credentialing, proctoring and provisional monitoring of doctors for whom a hospital lacks documented evidence of competence for performing a privilege. It also covers doctors asking to perform new procedures. MS.4.40 stresses continual hospital evaluation of a physician’s performance to identify any practice trends affecting patient safety or quality of care.
Freedman said that because of hospitals’ internal politics, aggressive economic goals, and the need to continually improve the quality of care and patient safety, they must increasingly turn to external peer review to provide the objective, evidence-based opinions they need to meet these areas of the JCAHO standards in a timely manner.
Under the new standards, hospitals must demonstrate they are making decisions about doctors that are based on objectivity and not personal bias or rivalries. The new standards demand “objective, evidence-based” evaluations that impartial third parties can provide, and hospitals of all sizes will need external help to assure compliance.
“Small and mid-sized hospitals conforming with these standards may need help conducting proctoring evaluations and ongoing reviews of doctors, because they’re often shorthanded in a particular medical specialty or their doctors have relationships outside the hospital that hinder objectivity,” he said. “Larger hospitals and hospital groups can also lack the right unbiased specialist peer for proctoring or reviews, or they may want an external review of a doctor’s performance data to discover any negative trend.”
“The good news about the new JCAHO standards affecting peer review is they emphasize processes that filter out substandard doctors by scrutinizing their work and insisting that doctors remain current on their skills in order to keep privileges. This will improve patient safety,” said Freedman. “As the standards are adopted, as an IRO, we’re hoping we will be reviewing fewer deficient physician judgments, because the standards strongly support ongoing training and upgrading of a doctor’s skills. Instead we expect to perform more corrective and educational peer reviews, rather than ones coming out of a peer review committee that lack objective validation.”
More information about external peer review services can be found on AllMed’s web site at http://www.allmedmd.com/.
AllMed Healthcare Management
CONTACT: Martin Middlewood, +1-360-882-1164, [email protected], forJoint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations
Web site: http://www.allmedmd.com/
Comments