The Health Law Ticker

The California Supreme Court recently issued its decision in Boermeester v. Carry. Though the case deals with fair procedure within a private university’s internal disciplinary proceedings, it provides helpful guidance for peer review bodies navigating medical disciplinary hearings.

Boermeester reiterated the long-standing admonition that courts should not try to impose “rigid procedures” upon private organizations’ administrative proceedings. Rather, the organizations themselves should develop methods for providing the fundamentals of fair ...

Parties in peer review hearings can present a wide range of relevant evidence, regardless of its admissibility in a court of law.  But California has passed a new “apology law” that modifies that standard, erecting a potential hurdle for medical staffs to admit relevant evidence against practitioners in peer review hearings.

Under California law, statements, writings, or benevolent gestures expressing sympathy or a general sense of benevolence relating to the pain, suffering, or death of a person involved in an accident are inadmissible in civil trials.  (Evid. Code, § 1160.)  ...

Given California’s shortage of primary care providers, nurse practitioners (“NPs”) are increasingly being asked to fill gaps in provider coverage.  With that background, Governor Newsom signed Assembly Bill 890 (“AB 890”) into law in 2020.  AB 890 allows NPs to practice with expanded independence under certain conditions.  Although nearly two years have passed since AB 890 was enacted, regulatory and legislative delay have prevented full implementation of the law.

But that’s expected to change soon.  The Board of Registered Nursing anticipates the law will be fully ...

While hospital medical staffs have traditionally handled most of California’s peer review activity, recent trends are forcing more and more medical groups to wrestle with reporting and fair hearing obligations when disciplining physicians—or else face costly litigation from doctors and six-figure fines from the Medical Board of California.

Broadly speaking, peer review is how healthcare entities—including medical groups—determine whether a physician is qualified to practice in a particular healthcare setting and perform ongoing assessments of that ...

The California Supreme Court has addressed yet another brick in the anti-SLAPP wall protecting the medical peer review process from challenges by disgruntled physicians and delivered a mixed-bag opinion, with one holding favoring peer reviewers and the other favoring the plaintiff physician. Readers of this blog are familiar with the ever-shifting battlefront between peer reviewers and reviewed physicians over the former’s use of the anti-SLAPP statute (Cal. Code Civ. Proc., § 425.16) to protect their review process from legal challenges by physicians. … 

Many medical staffs are wondering whether they may conduct remote peer review committee meetings in the interest of supporting social distancing efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic. While it is certainly reasonable to do so, the medical staff must ensure that they have appropriate safeguards in place prior to conducting such meetings. Below we have provided the answer to some questions that may arise when deciding whether to conduct peer review meetings remotely.

Do the governing documents already allow for meetings to be conducted by telephone or video?

Medical staffs should ...

For more than 15 years, the process of selecting a hearing officer for a medical staff peer review proceeding has been strongly influenced by the decision in Yaqub v. Salinas Valley Memorial Healthcare System 122 Cal. App. 4th 474 (2004). That decision held that a hearing officer in a peer review proceeding was disqualified for a financial bias based upon the hearing officer's “long–standing and continuous relationship" with the hospital, which created a “possible temptation" to favor the hospital.

The court disqualified the hearing officer despite the fact that “there ...

On July 22, 2019, the California Supreme Court issued its long-awaited opinion in Wilson v. CNN.¹  The primary question before the court concerned the application of the anti-SLAPP statute, Civil Procedure Code Section 425.16, to employment, discrimination, and retaliation claims.  The factual scenario before the court involved a journalist who alleged that his employer, CNN, denied him promotions, gave him unfavorable assignments, and ultimately fired him for unlawful discriminatory and retaliatory reasons.²  The employer responded by contending that the journalist was ...

In a decision affecting California hospitals, medical groups, medical staffs, and physicians, the California First District Court of Appeal has concluded that a physician’s notice and hearing rights apply to situations where a hospital directs a medical group of a closed department to remove a physician from the hospital schedule.

In Economy v. Sutter East Bay Hospitals, Sutter Hospital operated a closed anesthesia department pursuant to a contract with East Bay Anesthesiology Medical Group (East Bay Group).  The exclusive contract required all physicians providing ...

(Updated March 11, 2017) On February 3, 2017, the Medical Board of California (MBC) published the much-anticipated 12^th Edition of its Manual of Model Disciplinary Orders and Disciplinary Guidelines (Guidelines).  Drafts of this latest edition had been slugging through the approval process since mid-2015.

The most notable modification is to Standard Condition #33 (Non-practice While On Probation). Under the 11th Edition, the MBC defined nonpractice as any period of time respondent is not practicing medicine in California…for at least 40 hours in a calendar month in direct ...