Filing Whistleblower Actions to Avoid Peer Review

California's Legislature has endorsed peer review as a means of protecting the public from “those healing arts practitioners who provide substandard care or who engage in professional misconduct.” Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code ' 809(a)(6)-(7). “Hospital peer review, in the words of the Legislature, 'is essential to preserving the highest standards of medical practice' throughout California.” Kibler v. N. Inyo Cnty. Local Hosp. Dist., 39 Cal. 4th 192, 199 (2006).

California's peer-review statutes were enacted in response to the federal Health Care Quality Improvement Act of 1986, 42 U.S.C. ' 11111 et seq. (HCQIA), in which Congress mandated “effective professional peer review.” The Act sought to “restrict the ability of incompetent physicians to move from State to State without disclosure or discovery of the physician's previous damaging or incompetent performance” by establishing a national database of adverse information about individual doctors, and requiring hospitals to check the database before granting medical staff privileges. Adverse credentialing decisions by hospitals are reported to the Medical Board of California, the agency responsible for licensing and disciplining doctors, which forwards such reports to the national database. See Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code ' 805(a)(7), (b)-(c) & (e).