Changing Eligibility Criteria
In the event that you do not meet eligibility criteria for a privilege for which you wish to apply, the hospital may reject your application on that basis alone. Such a rejection is not reportable to the National Practitioner Data Bank or your malpractice insurance carrier. If your case does not meet eligibility criteria, your case will rarely qualify for the appeal and due process remedies of your hospital’s bylaws. Your best recourse is to work within your local medical staff structure to change those eligibility criteria. The following are some tools you may use in this process:
- Talk with other staff physicians and enlist their support.
- Quote Joint Commission (JC) standards that privileging should be based on documented training, experience and current competence, not on specialty alone.
- Assemble data on similar hospitals where family physicians are successfully credentialed for the procedure in question.
- Propose an expanded set of eligibility criteria that permit your application to be considered, but avoid criteria that include large numbers of proctored procedures when the number is not evidence-based.
