When a doctor is hired by a hospital, the hospital usually takes great care to verify the physician’s credentials, certificates, and licenses. The difficult part comes when they need to monitor the physician after he has started work. To this end, OPPE standards have been created.
OPPE is an acronym for Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation. Its meaning is that hospitals have to check up on a doctor’s performance on a continuous basis, rather than once every certain time period. When this happens as planned, problems may be addressed quickly.
As a part of complying with these standards, there are several decisions a hospital must make. These include who will review the information, how often it will be reviewed, and how the information will be put into the physician’s files.
In addition, the OPPE standards state that a hospital must decide how to use this information to make a decision about the doctor’s continuing practice. Once this decision has been made, it must also be documented in some way.
There are several ways a hospital may collect information on a physician. According to OPPE, these may include reviewing his charts, observing him directly, and monitoring his techniques. They may also choose to speak with others who have worked with the doctor, such as assistants, nurses, and administrators.
The exact data to be collected, however, is decided by the department in which the doctor works and approved by the medical staff. But the person collecting the data needs to realize that no information can sometimes be good information, and document such things as no infections and no patient complaints.
Once a physician’s performance has been reviewed, the OPPE standards say that the hospital must then decide what to do with his privileges. If no problems exist, they may keep him performing as before. If there is a problem, they may decide to do another evaluation or suspend a privilege.
They may also decide to take a privilege away if it is no longer needed. If a physician goes a long time without performing a certain duty, they may choose to evaluate him every time he performs it. And if the doctor is the only one in the hospital who performs a privilege, they may decide he needs to continue performing it if it is within the hospital’s mission to provide it. But whatever decisions they make about a particular doctor, a hospital can be certain that following the OPPE will greatly improve the level of patient care.
