Question: A patient died unexpectedly during hospitalization for a diabetic foot infection. The autopsy revealed the presence of a large saddle pulmonary embolus. The hospital’s peer review committee met to determine if care was suboptimal and whether prophylactic anticoagulation should have been used. When the attending doctor was subsequently sued for malpractice, the plaintiff’s attorney sought to subpoena all of the medical records, including the minutes of the peer review committee. Given this hypothetical scenario, which of the following can occur?
A. “Discovery” is the legal term given to the process during the pretrial phase for amassing relevant documents and other information.
B. A subpoena duces tecum, which is a court order for the production of relevant documents and one that should normally be obeyed, may be issued.
C. The hospital declines to hand over certain types of hospital records, such as peer review minutes, which in this case are statutorily protected from discovery.
D. The plaintiff attorney goes to the judge for an order to compel production and may or may not be successful.
E. All are correct.
Dr. S.Y. Tan
Answer: E. Physicians and other participants regularly meet, under strict confidential conditions, to discuss adverse events that occur in their institution. Such records are protected from “discovery,” which is a pretrial procedure for collecting evidence in preparation for trial. The rationale for keeping these records beyond the reach of the discovery process is to encourage participants to engage in candid and free-rein analysis of adverse medical events so as to avoid future mishaps. If the content and nature of these discussions were freely available to parties in litigation, there would be a natural reluctance to express one’s viewpoints in a forthright manner.
Any given state’s statute on discovery requires careful reading because it could differ from another state’s directive – with important legal consequences. As an example, Hawaii’s statute1 contains several inclusions and exclusions and reads in part: “... the information and data protected shall include proceedings and records of a peer review committee, hospital quality assurance committee, or health care review organization that include recordings, transcripts, minutes, and summaries of meetings, conversations, notes, materials, or reports created for, by, or at the direction of a peer review committee, quality assurance committee, or a health care review organization when related to a medical error reporting system. ... Information and data protected from discovery shall not include incident reports, occurrence reports, statements, or similar reports that state facts concerning a specific situation and shall not include records made in the regular course of business by a hospital ... including patient medical records. Original sources of information ... shall not be construed as being immune from discovery ... merely because they were reviewed ... or were in fact submitted to, a health care review organization.”
Predictably, plaintiff attorneys in a medical malpractice lawsuit will attempt to discover information regarding adverse events, hoping to learn about potential errors and judgment lapses, and thus gain an advantage over the defendant doctor and/or hospital. Several recent court cases highlight the contentious nature regarding whether a particular hospital report is to be deemed discoverable. Organized medicine, led by the American Medical Association, has mounted a vigorous response in arguing against the release of peer review and patient safety documents.
The AMA2 recently weighed in on the case of Daley v. Teruel and Ingalls Memorial Hospital. In 2013, a renal failure patient died in an Illinois hospital from injuries that arose from prolonged hypoglycemia. She had received insulin, but when her blood glucose dropped to 16 mg/dl, the treatment team was not alerted and she was later found unresponsive with irreversible brain damage. The issue was whether incident reports from the case that were submitted to a certified PSO (patient safety organization) could be discovered. The Federal Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act (PSQIA) had created PSOs to aggregate data from multiple sources to reduce adverse events and errors and improve medication safety.
An Illinois lower court ruled that, as part of the discovery process, the hospital had to turn over the report. However, the Illinois Appellate Court ruled in favor of the hospital, holding that the PSQIA protects the report because it is a “patient safety work product.”3 The AMA amicus brief had emphasized that Congress created a safeguarded patient safety process under the PSQIA to encourage hospitals to submit patient safety outcomes without fear of increased liability risk and that “these voluntarily created materials should be used for their intended purpose, not as a roadmap for litigation.”
New Jersey has also ruled against the discovery of a hospital’s self-critical report of a patient’s care, prepared in accordance with New Jersey’s Patient Safety Act.4 The plaintiff alleged that, when she reported to the emergency room at Chilton Medical Center complaining of persistent abdominal pain, fever, body aches, weakness, and a phlegmatic cough, she was incorrectly diagnosed as having pneumonia. In fact, she had appendicitis and a pelvic abscess. The New Jersey Supreme Court affirmed the panel’s order shielding the redacted document from discovery, but it reversed the judgment to the extent it ended the defendants’ discovery obligation with respect to this dispute, requiring instead that the lower court address, through current discovery rules, the proper balancing of interests between requesting and responding parties.
In a recent Michigan case,5 the trial court had earlier ruled that peer review documents at issue were in fact discoverable. Like similar statutes elsewhere, Michigan’s peer review privileges serve to encourage participation to improve on patient morbidity and mortality. The case centered on a court order compelling a Michigan hospital to release a physician’s credentialing file in a medical liability lawsuit on the narrow basis that the nondiscoverability privilege applied only to peer review deliberations and was inapplicable in the case. The trial judge had opined that, if all materials viewed by peer review committees were deemed undiscoverable, a hospital could never be held accountable for any negligent act within the purview of the committee. In its amicus brief in support of the hospital, the AMA argued that Michigan’s peer review privilege has historically spanned the bounds of the actual peer review process, and it countered that hospitals can be held liable – and are regularly held liable – without opening up these documents and that plaintiffs can use the same discovery mechanisms generally available to plaintiffs in other lawsuits.6 The case is currently under appeal.
In contrast, at least two state supreme courts have ruled to limit protections from discovery. The Florida Supreme Court has held that the federal law was intended to improve overall health care rather than to act as a shield to providers. In a case of alleged malpractice with severe neurological injuries, the court took a restrictive interpretation of the PSQIA as it relates to Florida’s risk-management and discovery laws, holding that patient safety work and related reports, when required by state law, do not come under the definition of patient safety work product and were therefore discoverable.7
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has likewise ruled that documents generated by a hospital’s outside contractor are not protected from discovery under the state’s Peer Review Protection Act. It agreed with a lower-court ruling that Monongahela Valley Hospital could not claim privilege for a performance file on an emergency department physician employed by the hospital’s contractor University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Emergency Medicine.8 The case alleged that the plaintiff’s chest and back pain was misdiagnosed as reflux disease when in fact it was a myocardial infarct.
Dr. Tan is professor of medicine and former adjunct professor of law at the University of Hawaii. This article is meant to be educational and does not constitute medical, ethical, or legal advice. For additional information, readers may contact the author at siang@hawaii.edu.
References
1. Hawaii Revised Statutes §624-25.5 (2012).
2. AMA fights to protect patient-safety work from legal discovery. AMA Morning Rounds. 2018 Aug 1.
3. Daley v. Teruel and Ingalls Memorial Hospital, 2018 Ill. App. LEXIS 440 (Ill. App. Ct. 2018).
4. Brugaletta v. Garcia, 190 A.3d 419 (NJ. 2018).
5. Dwyer v. Ascension Crittenton Hospital. Michigan Supreme Court SC: 158668, 919 N.W.2d 407 (Mi. 2018).
6. Appellate court case puts peer-review protections in danger. AMA Morning Rounds. 2019 Mar 29.
7. Charles v. Southern Baptist Hospital of Florida, Inc., 2017 Fla. LEXIS 231 (Fla. Jan. 31, 2017).
8. Reginelli v. Boggs, 2018 Pa. LEXIS 1503 (Pa. 2018).