Peer review statutes protect the proceedings, records, and deliberations of hospital committees evaluating clinical care and practitioner competence. The rationale is that candid self-evaluation improves care and would not occur if the materials were discoverable.
Protection typically covers committee minutes, evaluations, and reports generated for the committee, but not underlying medical records or facts otherwise available.
Alternative Names:
Medical Peer Review Privilege, Quality Assurance Privilege
Why it Matters?
Peer review privilege is the central discovery battleground in hospital litigation, because the protected materials are precisely what a corporate negligence or credentialing claim requires. Scope disputes recur over documents created for dual purposes, incident reports, and root cause analyses. The federal Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act adds a separate protection that sometimes reaches material state law would not.
Frequently Confused with
Related terms
Frequently asked questions
Does peer review privilege protect the medical records?
What is patient safety work product?
