Last week in a medical malpractice case in Alabama, a federal court denied the plaintiff’s motion to compel production by a hospital of the defendant doctor’s personnel file. The plaintiff believed that the file could show that the hospital was negligent in hiring and supervising the doctor and might contain information about treatment of the plaintiff, about the training of the doctor in the procedure the plaintiff underwent, and about the reason the doctor later left the hospital.

The primary reason cited by the court for denying the motion was the availability of the information through “less invasive means” such as a deposition or interrogatories of the doctor. The court also relied on Alabama’s peer review statute and the federal peer review statute—the Health Care Quality Improvement Act of 1986.

But the language of the opinion suggests a misunderstanding of the underlying purpose of the federal statute. The court quotes the Act’s preamble— “There is an overriding national need to provide incentive and protection for physicians engaging in effective professional peer review”—as the basis for ruling that the material was not discoverable.

The court is correct in saying that the Act is meant to “provide incentive and protection for physicians.”  What the court seems to miss, though, is that the physicians who needed the incentive and protection were the physicians engaging in the peer review—not the one under review. The point of the preamble is that physicians who review a peer need protection from lawsuits by that peer.

Congress’s ultimate goal was to protect patients from incompetent doctors. As a means to that goal, Congress removed a barrier—fear of liability for engaging in evaluation—so there would be no excuse for failing to evaluate a peer. But here the court uses the Act to protect the defendant doctor and hospital from a possible claim that the evaluation was flawed, or that it proved the doctor was incompetent, or that the hospital failed to act on the evaluation. Isn’t that the opposite of what Congress intended?

The case is McBride v. Houston County Health, No. 1:12cv1047-MHT-TFM (M.D. Ala.).