State to Drop Suit Against 2 Hospitals

MISSION VIEJO —  Saying it now has the information it needs, the Medical Board of California announced Wednesday that it is dropping its lawsuit against two Orange County hospitals after having accused both of failing to provide information about problem doctors.

Medical board officials said they received the disclosures from Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center of Mission Viejo and hope to receive similar materials from Western Medical Center-Santa Ana that will permit them to drop the suit.

“We intend to drop the action against both at the same time,” said Candis Cohen, spokeswoman for the medical board in Sacramento. “Now we’ve got the information we need.”

However, Cohen declined to elaborate on precisely what the board was seeking, saying the hospital disclosures are privileged information. She called the suit, which was filed Nov. 22 in Orange County Superior Court, “one more in a series that has permitted us to get the information we need to do our job.”

The suit had accused both hospitals of separate violations of state reporting statutes.

It accused the Mission Viejo hospital of failing to give the state more detailed information about a suspended doctor whose behavior was “so erratic that the physician was considered to be a danger to both employees and patients.”

The suit accused Western Medical Center-Santa Ana of failing to provide supporting documentation about a doctor whose staff privileges were denied for having made “misrepresentations and omissions” in his application. Hospital officials said the doctor was hired, then let go after they detected “inconsistencies” in his application.

Becky Barney-Villano, spokeswoman for the Mission Viejo hospital, said Wednesday that the suit had arisen over the board’s inability to “obtain peer review records [of the doctor in question] that are protected under the California Evidence Code.”

Barney-Villano said the hospital had been told by the state attorney general’s office that Mission Hospital “had, in fact, been forthcoming in providing the medical board with the information they needed.”

But, she noted, that did not mean that hospital officials had ever turned over peer review records.

“What we provided them initially,” Barney-Villano said, “was sufficient for them to investigate this complaint. We haven’t provided anything that we did not provide initially.

“To our way of thinking,” she added, “[the suit] should have never been filed.”

Deputy Atty. Gen. Heidi Weisbaum, who is handling the case for the medical board, declined comment on the suit.