Academic Hospitals & Part Time Physicians
This is a challenge facing all hospitals as certain aspects of medical practice change and evolve, reducing the contact of certain specialists with hospitals where they may have previously been more active. However, good practices require that hospitals have enough information about its practitioners before reappointing them. Hospitals must have procedures in place for assessing low volume practitioners in order to carefully evaluate their clinical abilities and ensure that only qualified practitioners are being reappointed.
During the previous appointment period, practitioners whose qualifications could not be sufficiently documented may be denied reappointment with clinical privileges and instead moved to the category of Membership without Privileges. This permits practitioners to continue to obtain clinical data about their patients which they require in order to provide quality office care to those patients who sought inpatient care from physicians or wanted to obtain their outpatient studies at the Hospital. Evaluating the low volume practitioners is a time consuming and often legally challenging process.
The American Medical Foundation has experience assisting the Medical Staff Office of institutions to address its core privileging issues and carefully obtain information on national criteria which are then applied consistently and appropriately.