Hospital Fails To Establish Patient's Incident Reports Confidential: Disclosure Ordered By Court
October, 2006
A New York Supreme Court, Suffolk County, recently held in Williams v. Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Medical Center, 13 Misc.3d 1204(A), Slip Copy, 2006 WL 2559527 (Table) N.Y.Sup., 2006, that a hospital’s incident report was subject to discovery. The Court concluded that Brookhaven Memorial Hospital (“Brookhaven”) failed to meet its burden of establishing that certain incident reports are confidential and protected from disclosure by Education Law § 6527(3) and Public Health Law § 2805-m, and, therefore, the documents were subject to disclosure.
The Court noted that it is the burden of the entity seeking to invoke the privilege to establish that the documents sought were prepared in accordance with the relevant statutes. See also Marte v. Brooklyn Hosp. Center, 9 A.D.2d 41 (2d Dep’t 2001). The Court stated that there was no showing that Brookhaven actually prepared any committee review incident reports for the Department of Health, as required under PHL § 2805(1). See also Maisch v. Millard Fillmore Hosps., 262 A.D.2d 1017 (4th Dep’t 1991). In relevant part, the Court found that confidentiality is required pursuant to PHL § 2805-m, only for “the reports required pursuant to section twenty-eight hundred five-1 of this article.” Williams, 13 Misc.3d 1204. Therefore, the Court held that “the Hospital failed to establish it’s burden that any documents were prepared under PHL § 2805-1 and/or Education Law § 6257(3).” Id.
Education Law § 6257(3) is designed to encourage peer review of physicians by guaranteeing confidentiality to those persons performing the review function. The purpose of the discovery exclusion is to enhance the objectivity of the review process and to assure that medical review committees may frankly and objectively analyze the quality of health services rendered by hospitals. Logue v. Velez, 92 N.Y.2d 13, 677 N.Y.S.2d 6 (1988). It basically protects the liability of individuals who serve on certain delineated medical committees. Aside from medical incident reports required by the Department of Health under PHL § 2805-1, it also exempts from disclosure records relating to medical review and quality assurance functions of the delineated committees, and records reflecting participation in a medical and dental malpractice prevention program.
The Court concluded that Brookhaven failed to establish that the patient incident reports were generated in connection with a quality assurance function pursuant to Education Law § 6257(3) or malpractice prevention program pursuant to PHL § 2805-1. The Court held that the documents in question were not entitled to statutory confidentiality and, thus, were subject to disclosure. The Court stated that the reports at issue were not assessing the care provided to the injured plaintiff, but simply reporting an incident that is not protected from disclosure. The Court further concluded that where a report is found to be “multi-motivated,” immunity is not warranted. Williams, 13 Misc.3d 1204.
Learning Point: It is the burden on Defendant hospitals to establish that documents sought in discovery in a medical malpractice action were prepared in accordance with relevant statutes, PHL § 2805-1 and/or Education Law § 6257(3), for those documents to be protected from disclosure. These documents must be generated in connection with a quality assurance review function and not simply document an incident that occurred in the hospital. Hospitals should learn from Williams to structure their internal department rules to ensure that any documents created that record an incident are made under the confines of a quality assurance review function or malpractice prevention program within the hospital, in order to prevent disclosure in a medical malpractice action.
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