What is a hospital peer review?
Hospital peer review refers to the review of a case or group of cases to determine if a doctor’s work meets the standard of care. Today, many hospitals use IROs to review the work of their practitioners, to verify their credentials and to make decisions on privileging. Once, hospitals used external peer review only for sentinel events as a quality control effort. In 2007, the Joint Commission (formerly JACHO) broke peer review into “focused” and “on-going” evaluations of physicians to improve the overall quality of care within hospitals. Many hospitals are increasingly turning to IROs to perform quality of care reviews, as well as for the credentialing and re-credentialing of their practitioners. As a result, IROs are becoming involved in systematic, proactive peer review as an ongoing part of many hospitals’ performance improvement and quality management efforts.
