Have an all-star MSP on your team? We want to know! Email CRC editor Karla Accorto at kaccorto@hcpro.com with their name, organization, email address, and a few sentences about what makes them such a great MSP and team member. Your nominated MSP could be featured in an upcoming issue of our Credentialing Resource Center Digest!

Dealing with a disruptive physician is difficult enough when you have time to plan for an intervention and have others to help you. But, what can you do when you are confronted by a disruptive physician during a committee meeting?

The U.S. health care system is famously resistant to government-imposed change. It took decades to create Medicare and Medicaid, mostly due to opposition from the medical-industrial complex. Then it was nearly another half-century before the passage of the Affordable Care Act. But the COVID-19 pandemic has done what no president or social movement or venture capitalist could have dreamed of: It forced sudden major changes to the nation’s health care system that are unlikely to be reversed.

Proactive recruitment means finding physicians on the medical staff who have the ability to lead but whose talents may not have come to the notice of others. Using surveys is one tool to ferret out potential leaders. Questionnaires distributed to the entire medical staff at periodic intervals can get people interested in leadership roles, identify any barriers discouraging them from coming forward, and discover if there is a timeframe when someone might consider taking on a new role.

The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division (the “Court”) dismissed most of a claim but allowed a small part to proceed to discovery, finding that a hospital committee’s reversal of a decision to renew a practitioner’s medical privileges could plausibly be a form of retaliation.

Member rights is a logical starting point for the bylaws. The most fundamental rights accorded members of the medical staff relate to the due process they are provided if the medical executive committee (MEC) recommends that corrective action. Corrective action is defined as the termination of medical staff membership or a restriction, reduction, modification, or termination of medical staff privileges for reasons of clinical incompetence or unprofessional conduct. This will be covered in detail in subsequent sections

A key element that bylaws should address is the rights and due process that are to be afforded to medical staff members. This section could begin with a statement of member rights followed by an outline of initial collegial intervention and a progressive description of next steps when current steps have failed to bring about the expected performance. This method is consistent with the movement of many staffs to a performance improvement model of physician performance as outlined in the Physician Performance Pyramid Model.