Florida Supreme Court lifts past peer review confidentiality

Dissenting judges said physicians and hospitals have a right to rely on past protections despite a more recent constitutional amendment opening up incident reports.

By Amy Lynn Sorrel, AMNews staff. April 7, 2008.

The Florida Supreme Court ignored decades of peer review protections when it ruled March 6 to allow patients to examine records on past adverse medical incidents, physicians and hospital organizations say.

The 4-3 high court decision says a state constitutional amendment giving patients access to records related to adverse medical incidents applies retroactively and opens up related peer review documents created before the amendment passed via ballot measure in November 2004.

Amendment 7 -- dubbed the "Patients' Right to Know About Adverse Medical Incidents" -- also overrides certain legislative provisions passed in June 2005 to implement the measure and preserve the confidentiality of peer review records created before its adoption, the majority concluded. Justices ruled part of the 2005 statute unconstitutional because it restricted the amendment's purpose in making an "immediate change" in the law governing access to medical incident records.

The high court decision was prompted by a conflict that arose in the lower courts in 2006. Two appeals courts agreed that Amendment 7 preempted earlier statutes shielding peer review records but split over whether the measure affected only future peer review documents.

The Supreme Court said no.

The language in the amendment and the ballot measure "make it abundantly clear that the chief purpose of Amendment 7 was to do away with the legislative restrictions on a Florida patient's access to a medical provider's 'history of acts, neglects or defaults' because such history 'may be important to a patient,' " the majority opinion states. "Medical providers have never been granted a substantive vested right in the secrecy of information contained in the limited medical records in question."