Another Pennsylvania case has tackled what information falls within the Pennsylvania Peer Review Protection Act (PRPA), 63 P.S. 425.1, et seq. The reader may recall that last year the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision in Reginelli v. Boggs, 181 A.3d 293 (Pa. 2018), excluded the personnel files of a hospital’s contractor from the PRPA’s scope. This year, in Estate of Krappa v. Lyons, 2019 Pa. Super. 168 (Pa. Super. Ct. 2019), decided May 7, the Pennsylvania Superior Court extended the exclusion to the files of a hospital’s own credentialing committee.

Reginelli was a medical malpractice case. The hospital in the case, Monongahela Valley Hospital, had contracted with UPMC Emergency Medicine, Inc. (UEM) for administrative and staffing services in the hospital’s emergency department. The plaintiff, Eleanor Reginelli, arrived at the hospital by ambulance with stomach pains. She was treated by Dr. Marcellus Boggs who, Reginelli alleged, failed to diagnose a heart problem. The plaintiff’s counsel filed a motion seeking from the hospital Boggs’ performance file prepared and maintained by his ER supervisor, Dr. Brenda Walther. Both Boggs and Walther were UEM employees.