News roundup August 16-20

Whether you are planning an intervention or simply trying to strengthen your relationship with your colleagues, good communication skills can help you succeed. But good communication skills don't often come naturally-they need to be learned, practiced, and implemented. The following tips can help you become a better communicator.

The 2021 National Provider Enrollment Forum delivers two days of engaging education and training to provider enrollment professionals and credentialing/privileging professionals. Experienced veterans and top industry experts will be on hand to provide you best practices and tips. You won’t want to miss this opportunity to get step-by-step training and answers to your most pressing questions! Don't miss our brand-new credentialing track dedicated to the most important topics in credentialing and privileging.

For more information, including the agenda, click here.

Fifty-six percent of physicians have experienced or seen other physicians behaving inappropriately, according to a new report by Medscape. More than 2,000 physicians were surveyed about the types of inappropriate behavior they had seen by physicians within the past five years. They reported it most often occurred in the workplace (35%), followed by outside the workplace or on social media (26% each).

The Supreme Court of Kentucky (the "Court") reversed a lower court's ruling, finding that a root cause analysis (RCA) report was protected by an amended portion of the state's peer review statute. The plaintiffs, the estate of Donald Patrick Reddington Sr., sued Jewish Hospital (the "Hospital") following Reddington's death during his stay there as a patient.

A peer review culture must support physician improvement through structures, policies, and practices designed to minimize biases. And the best way to decrease process bias is to standardize the process to improve consistency and fairness.

Multihospital systems may face unique challenges as they deal with diversity in peer review methods among their individual hospital medical staffs, says Robert J. Marder, MD, president of Robert J. Marder Consulting, who consults with hospital medical staffs to help them evaluate and improve their approach to peer review and physician performance measurement.