A Health System’s Rapid Shift to Digital Peer Review

Peer review processes can make or break providers and their healthcare organizations. Well-designed programs safeguard quality initiatives, ensure compliance, and affect patient outcomes and reimbursement under value-based payment systems. The best peer review programs also foster constructive performance improvement within a fair, efficient, and reliable process that aids providers’ professional growth. Technology reinforces these goals, creating electronic workflows to streamline tasks and eliminate circumvention of policies and procedures. Embracing a digital peer review process gives providers and reviewers the ability to participate from anywhere at any time, giving much-needed time back as compared with in-person meetings using manual processes. Action plans resulting from reviews identify positive contributions or improvement opportunities, enabling providers to own the process and engage in new ways. Fournier, Jobin, Lapointe, and Bahl (2021) emphasize that physicians can be significant change agents when they share ownership. A key driver of such change is innovation. In this spirit, North Carolina-based Cone Health embarked on a Lean project to rapidly adopt electronic peer review. The goal was threefold: eliminate waste, engage reviewers, and improve quality. Fournier, P.L., Jobin, M.H., Lapointe, L., & Bahl, L. Lean implementation in healthcare: offsetting physicians’ resistance to change. Production Planning & Control, DOI: 10.1080/09537287.2021.1938730.