Patient Safety Work Product and Its Limitations: A Discussion of Two Recent Cases

Through the PSQIA, the mechanism for the receipt of this information was the formation of patient safety organizations and a national patient safety database. Patient safety organizations (PSOs) are defined as private organizations, or a component thereof, that are certified through a process developed through the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Under the Act, PSOs perform the activities of conducting and organizing, as their primary activity, efforts to improve patient safety and the quality of health care delivery, collecting and analyzing patient safety work product that is submitted by their providers, and other activities. The goal of a PSO is to improve patient safety by utilizing patient safety work product to carry out its activities and to minimize patient risk of health care errors.

As part of the PSQIA, Congress stated that the information provided by the patient safety organizations and collected in the National Patient Database was to be referred to as “patient safety work product.” The Act specifically states that patient safety work product is not subject to discovery in connection with a civil or administrative proceeding, and there are a host of other protections from disclosure under the Act. The goal of providing protection from disclosure was to encourage health care providers to share information without fear of liability.