Report From President of the Medical Staff

Neil Culligan, MD

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To start the year I want to present the composition of our medical staff leadership. I will continue to serve, in my third year, as medical staff president. Here are the other members:

Vice President - Bill Begg
Secretary/Treasurer - Brian Pollack

Medical staff representatives to the medical executive committee:

Jo-Ann Maroto-Soltis (Hospitalist)
Kirt Frederickson (Interventional Radiology)
Karen Tarbell (Medicine)
Bruce Cohen (Peds)
Dan Goldstein (OB-GYN)
Ross Henshaw (Surgery)

I would like to thank Dave Pazer, Uwe Koepke, Mahalingam Satchi, and Damanjeet Chaubey who will be stepping off the committee.

Finally, Tejash Patel will be joining Sohel Islam as medical staff representatives to the Medical Affairs Committee of the Board.

These are all volunteer positions that require a great deal of time and effort, and we should all thank them for their service.

Our new peer review process is up and running. The Triage Council (Drs. Miller, Culligan, and Wenick; Dawn Myles and Greg D’Amato) meets weekly to review cases identified by our PI coordinators and physician champions (mostly former peer review committee chairpersons). The case may be dropped at this level, an educational letter may be sent, it may be referred to the department chairperson, or it may be referred to the new oversight committee (Professional Practice Evaluation Committee – Drs. Chaubey, Gillotti, Tittle, C. Tenenbaum, and Sandhu as well as the triage council members). Final disposition (e.g. letter, collegial intervention, performance improvement plan) then occurs, all typically within a few weeks of case identification.

Please keep in mind that all these activities are strictly confidential and are meant solely as educational to improve practitioner performance, which will in turn improve quality of patient care. This is a state-of-the-art peer review system that can deal with complicated inter-departmental cases. Other medical staff members may be called on an ad hoc basis to provide expertise in case review, and we appreciate your time and effort.

Our ability to work together is going to be even more crucial given the changes in healthcare reform we will be facing. Please plan to attend our quarterly general medical staff meetings and the informal social gatherings afterwards. I hope to see you there,
Neil