What Does MSSP Stand For? A Question From This Week's Health Wonk Review

The second edition of the new carnival of health policy blog posts, Health Wonk Review, is up at The Healthcare Blog by Matthew Holt.

Near the bottom of this issue's rather impressive collection is a link to my post on Board Certification and Credentialing as recently discussed in the Journal of the American Medical Association. 

Matthew introduces the post with " Rita at the MSSP Nexus Blog (and no I still don’t know what that title means) ...  Well now Matthew, I'm so glad you (sort of) asked!

The acronym MSSP (now often shortened to just MSP) stands for Medical Staff Service Professional.  The word Nexus was tacked on because I wanted my web site, which came online in 2002, to be a means of connection and a core resource for MSSPs everywhere. 

If you're not sure what a Medical Staff Service Professional does, don't feel bad.  Until 1992 when I started in this field neither did I, and I'd already worked in hospitals for several years.  We're often a "behind the scenes" department.  In fact, on those rare occasions when the Medical/Professional Staff Office does get a lot of attention, it's usually because something has gone terribly awry. 

Medical Staff Service Professionals are a vital part of your healthcare team, but you won't receive a bill from us, and in most cases, you'll never know our names. We partner with Medical and Administrative leadership to protect patients from unskilled, impaired, or in the worst case, fraudulent physicians. Among our responsibilities are the verification of licenses, education, training, and skills of physicians and other providers of care.

In 1998 Dr. Linda Nash, an Administrator at Ingham Regional Medical Center in Lansing Michigan, with the support of some of my colleagues, discovered among their staff applicants a fraud - Dennis Roark.  Roark received his Michigan medical license in 1994 by submitting forged documents to the state Department of Consumer and Industry Services.

That's certainly a dramatic case, and fortunately a rare example.  Most of the physicians we "credential" are just who they say they are. Sometimes however, we discover that applicants may not have all the formal education or certifications they indicate on their applications.  On occasion we find that they have lost a license in another state, have several malpractice actions they forgot to mention, or have been asked to resign from another medical staff because of unwillingness to correct extremely disruptive behavior.  At times we discover that the applicant is currently struggling with substance abuse and impairment.

For those of you reading this and grumbling about what a waste of time and effort credentialing is, 97% of the time you are absolutely correct.  The other 3% of the time we are life savers; and it could be your life, or the life of someone you love, that we save.