A pediatrician gave a vaccine her chart said was due. The record existed, buried in a corner of Epic nobody thought to check, and the health system moved to put her on a corrective action plan for it. Health law attorney Dennis Hursh, who reviews physician employment agreements, explains why EMR failures land on the doctor instead of the system, what a corrective action does to credentialing for the next five years, and the contract language that stops it before it starts.
⏱️ Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:17 The pediatrician who did everything right
1:12 What the health system did instead of fixing Epic
1:47 The sentence that would have followed her career
2:18 Why she resigned instead of taking the plan
2:54 Where a vaccine record hides inside the chart
4:04 The cardiology letter that shows up under GI
5:17 If the FAA ran like health care
6:30 The contract clause that stops a corrective action
7:46 What credentialing asks about for five years
9:17 Whether resigning was her only move
10:22 The exit letter that hides what happened
11:30 Who decides what counts as poor quality care
12:06 Take home messages
About this episode:
Dennis Hursh is a health law attorney and founder of Physician Agreements Health Law, and he spends his days inside the employment contracts physicians sign without reading closely. He brings a case that started with a routine well-child visit. The chart showed the vaccines were due, the parents agreed, the shots were given, and only when the grandmother spoke up did anyone find the original record sitting under a tab in Epic called Media. The health system did not fix the system. It counseled the physician and drafted a corrective action plan citing failure to follow the vaccine policy, language Hursh says any future employer would read as evidence she is an anti-vaccine physician. She resigned instead, walked into a covenant not to compete, and a community that had her for 40 years lost its pediatrician. Hursh explains how scanned records land in the wrong section under the wrong specialty, why a corrective action plan follows a physician through credentialing questions for five years, and what he negotiates into contracts instead: a quality of care provision with a mutually agreed third-party reviewer and 60 days to cure. His take-home is blunt. Most physicians assume poor quality care language will never apply to them, and the hospital decides what the phrase means.
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#PhysicianContracts #ElectronicHealthRecords #PhysicianBurnout
