This website is dedicated to our Founder, Verner S. Waite, M.D., FACS (1928-2007). His landmark editorial was published in 1994 in the American Journal of Surgery.

Semmelweis Society International (SSI) is actively engaged in an effort to end the “sham peer review” of medical professionals, nurses, and physicians when they are wrongfully accused of acts that can result in the loss of their clinical privileges.

Presently, SSI is compiling a repository of peer review case law from each federal circuit and state to assist practitioners and their legal counsels in effectively fighting the well-funded hospitals and health systems which foster bad-faith peer review in the pursuit of eliminating economic competitors, whistleblowers, and those physicians disagreeing with administrative policies and the politically unpopular.

A similar educational initiative aimed at state and federal legislators are being formulated to address the egregious loopholes in the present peer review system allowed under the Health Care Quality Improvement Act of 1986 (HCQIA). These legislative changes removed the fundamental fairness and due process of the peer review system. Instead of improving healthcare, HCQIA (pronounced “HICK-WA”) indemnifies medical boards and hospitals that maliciously attack or retaliate against good physicians and erode quality healthcare.

Ending these retaliatory practices and assisting targeted physicians and nurses is the focus the SSI’s efforts.