Medical Peer Review - History

History

Further information: Quality improvement, Clinical audit, and Clinical peer review

Medical audit, which remains the predominant mode of peer review in Europe, is a focused study of the process and/or outcomes of care for a specified patient cohort using pre-defined criteria, focused on a diagnosis, procedure or clinical situation. This audit process was revised by changes to The Joint Commission standards were revised in 1979, dispensing with the audit requirement and calling for an organized system of Quality Assurance (QA). Thus the objective of a medical peer review committee became, to investigate the medical care rendered in order to determine whether accepted standards of care have been met. Contemporaneous with this change, hospitals and physicians adopted generic screening to improve quality of care, despite warnings from the developers of these screens that they were not validated for this purpose, having originally been developed to evaluate no-fault malpractice insurance plans.

The focus on the question of whether the standard of care had been met persisted despite many criticisms, but is increasingly recognized to be outdated, replaced over the past decade by Quality Improvement (QI) principles.

Read more about this topic:  Medical Peer Review

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    “Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
    —Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)

    “The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “... that there is no other way,
    That the history of creation proceeds according to
    Stringent laws, and that things
    Do get done in this way, but never the things
    We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
    To see come into being.”
    —John Ashbery (b. 1927)