Aug 25
Student’s Article Examines Ways to Improve Hospital Peer Review
Meghana Chalasani, M.B.A., a third-year medicine student at NEOMED, recently published an article in the Journal of Hospital Medicine. The article, titled “Hospital Peer Review: Time to Reboot,” was co-authored by Ankur Kalra, M.D., Indiana University School of Medicine, and Vineet Chopra, M.D., M.Sc., University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
“Learning from health care mistakes through the lens of peer review serves to maximize benefits for patients, providers and payers,” the authors wrote. “Reviewing errors thoughtfully to understand the relative contributions of individual and system issues can help prevent future events. However, the quest for this goal sometimes leads to punitive corrective processes directed toward our peers.”
To improve the hospital peer-review process and to prevent misuse of the process for malicious purposes, the authors propose:
- Establishing and standardizing criteria for peer review
- Categorizing cases and consequences to ensure consistency
- Avoiding conflicts of interest on peer review committees
- Ensuring the process is transparent
