Health Law Advisor

Background

On December 10, 2024, the Supreme Court of Ohio issued its decision in Stull v. Summa, a medical negligence case in which the defendants argued that Ohio’s statutory peer-review privilege protected from discovery the file the hospital maintained on a resident physician, which included, among other things, quality reviews and assessments of the resident’s clinical competency and professional conduct. The Supreme Court of Ohio decided one issue: Does the peer-review privilege in R.C. 2305.252 apply to a health care entity’s files about resident physicians?

This case arose from the medical treatment of head injuries that the patient sustained during a car crash. The patient and his guardians filed a medical negligence lawsuit against the hospital and its employed health care professionals, including a resident physician who participated in the patient’s care. The plaintiffs alleged that the resident improperly intubated the patient, causing the patient to sustain a brain injury.

In September of this year, New York City Councilwoman Julie Menin announced her plan to introduce a series of bills that would create further price transparency requirements for hospitals, with noncompliance resulting in high financial penalties.

The bill package would create an office of hospital accountability that would inform the public as to how much hospitals are charging for various services via a price transparency information portal, where hospitals would be required to provide certain key pricing information to the public. Currently, such pricing data is not typically available for public access, and patients typically have little knowledge regarding how much they will be charged for services.

Building on attempts in recent years to strengthen the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) white collar criminal enforcement, on September 15, 2022, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced revisions to DOJ’s corporate criminal enforcement policies. The new policies, and those that are in development, further attempt to put pressure on companies to implement effective compliance policies and to self-report if there are problems. Notably, the new DOJ policies set forth changes to existing DOJ policies through a “combination of carrots and sticks – with a mix of incentives and deterrence,” with the goal of “giving general counsels and chief compliance officers the tools they need to make a business case for responsible corporate behavior” through seven key areas: