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Fox v. Parma Community General Hospital4/7/2005
{ } Plaintiff-appellant, Michael F. Fox, M.D., appeals from the order of the trial court that entered summary judgment in favor of defendants-appellees Parma Community General Hospital ("PCGH"), Edward Robertson, M.D., Patrick Renner, M.D., Spencer Anderson, M.D., Sherry Hillier, M.D., and Barbara Wojtala, in plaintiff's action for damages claimed in connection with peer-review proceedings. For the reasons set forth below, we affirm.
{ } Plaintiff is a medical doctor who is board certified as a specialist in colon and rectal surgery. In 1993, the board of trustees of the hospital extended "courtesy staff" privileges to plaintiff. The board continued to reappoint plaintiff for two-year periods and in 1999, gave him "active staff" privileges for general and colon and rectal surgery. Under the terms of the hospital's medical staff bylaws, plaintiff was obligated to notify PCGH in the event that his privileges at any other health care facility were subject to corrective action.
{ } Plaintiff also had privileges at Southwest General Hospital ("Southwest") beginning in 1993. His privileges at Southwest were suspended in February 2000, however. It is undisputed that he did not notify PCGH of this suspension.
{ } In July 2000, plaintiff requested privileges to perform colostomies and polypectomies at PCGH. In ruling upon this request, the PCGH learned that plaintiff's privileges had been suspended at Southwest. The Surgical Services Quality Support Committee, a subcommittee of PCGH's Department of Surgery, subsequently reviewed all of plaintiff's cases from 1999 forward, or approximately 160 inpatient cases and approximately 310 outpatient cases.
{ } In December 2000, the hospital provided plaintiff with preliminary results of this review. PCGH did not identify quality-of-care issues, but did identify deficiencies of "medical record timeliness/documentation" pertaining to transcription and dictation of files and deficiencies of "utilization and length of stay" pertaining to patient admission and hospitalization.
{ } In January 2001, plaintiff was placed on precautionary suspension at St. John West Shore Hospital.
{ } In a report submitted to PCGH's Medical Staff Executive Committee on April 2, 2001, the Surgical Services Quality Support Committee indicated:
{ } "Individually, these cases may not have raised concerns.
However, when these cases are reviewed and summarized there is a concern about the number of readmissions, and returns to surgery, as well as appropriateness of surgical procedures. The aggregate of these cases become problematic. As a result, the reviewers are recommending an outside review be done on [plaintiff's] cases.
{ } "Using various regulatory standards to evaluate plaintiff's cases during the relevant time period, PCGH compiled a list of nine cases for outside review. The Medical Staff Executive Committee selected Christopher R. Mantyh, M.D., an assistant professor of surgery at Duke University Medical Center, to conduct the review."
{ } Dr. Mantyh's results were presented to the Medical Staff Executive Committee on June 4, 2001. Dr. Mantyh concluded:
{ } "1. Many of the cases involve * * * patients with difficult medical and surgical problems [who would] benefit from having their surgical procedures performed at a tertiary medical care center [rather than PCGH].
{ } "2. Often a more complex surgery was performed than needed.
{ } "3. Surgical techniques that are either of historic interest or are very novel were employed for relatively straightforward problems.
{ } "4. Often the surgical plan was n
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