Hendrickson: Malpractice suits typically include the charge of negligent credentialing

As a fellow MSP, you are aware of the fact that every medical malpractice suit against a physician and hospital almost always includes the charge that the hospital was independently negligent when it granted membership and/or clinical privileges to the physician. 

A recent Webinar on negligent credentialing I “attended” covered the importance of establishing and uniformly applying credentialing criteria as well as documenting grounds for exceptions to minimize negligent credentialing claims. There were over 4,000 participants logged in on this session.  The presenters stressed the importance of the following:

• Adopting or following your state licensing requirements
• Adopting or following accreditation standards (i.e. FPPE and OPPE)
• Adopting or following your medical staff bylaws, rules and regulations, policies, credentialing privileging criteria
• Review the quality or performance improvement files of each physician at their reappointment and/or at other designated times if monitoring activity has been recommended
• Require and review procedures performed by physicians at reappointment time; if your facility shows no activity, require adequate documentation of procedures performed at another facility where physician has privileges
• Require physicians to provide information that they obtained additional or continuing medical education consistent with requirement to exercise special procedures
• Consider restrictions to privileges and monitor accordingly, if a physician has had a history of malpractice settlements/judgments, disciplinary actions, insurance gaps, license problems, patterns of substandard care which has not improved even though there was medical staff intervention, or evidence of impairment
• Do not grant certain privileges if physician is clearly not qualified (i.e. take emergency department calls)

According to the presenter, failure to abide by these standards will be used against the hospital in a negligent credentialing claim.