Medical staff policies that require practitioners to sign releases before they disclose information to a requesting hospital are designed to protect an institution against lawsuits. But in the case of disclosing a practitioner’s list of privileges, on what grounds could the practitioner sue the disclosing hospital?

Hoping that education will help them keep their hospitals open, rural hospital executives and board members in Georgia are going back to school. In 2018, the Georgia General Assembly implemented a training requirement for rural hospital executives, board members, and hospital authority members. The group, from 59 rural hospitals across the state, must complete 8 hours of education by the end of 2020.

Kristine Kirstein, MHA, helped reinvigorate the onboarding process at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. She says the following four steps helped the organization streamline the practitioner onboarding process.

As the need for increased healthcare services becomes more widespread in even the most remote parts of the country, providers continue to look for the most cost-efficient way to fill that need. Yet the solution now being adopted isn’t to make hospitals bigger—instead, facility operators are thinking smaller.

Before sending peer review information, a medical staff should first look at state laws to ensure it has a mechanism in place to make disclosures in a confidential manner. For example, Texas allows committee-to-committee disclosures, so for medical staffs in that state, it’s a best practice to include language in the response letter referencing the section of the Texas statute that allows those disclosures without waiving any privileges.