Medical staff credentialing and privileging determinations: Emerging role of the risk manager (summer 1991)

✍ Scribed by Sheila Hagg-Rickert

• Publisher: Wiley (John Wiley & Sons)
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 402 KB
• Volume: 20
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1074-4797
• DOI: 10.1002/jhrm.5600200404

✦ Synopsis

Since the late 19 th century, membership on the medical staffs of America hospitals has been restricted to practitioners specifically appointed by the hospital governing board, typically after recommendation by the existing medical staff. Until relatively recently, most hospital risk managers had little involvement with securing and maintaining the hospital's medical staff.

Criteria for appointment to the medical staff should be clearly articulated, fairly applied, and rationally related to ascertaining the individual's fitness to practice at the hospital.

However, the following recent developments have resulted in a greater risk management focus on medical staff issues: (1) expanding notions of hospital corporate liability to both injured patients and those practitioners denied requested clinical privileges, (2) the passage of the Health Care Quality Improvement Act of 1986, and ( 3 ) the establishment of the National Practitioner Data Bank.