Medical Peer Review.

American medicine has a longstanding tradition of quality assurance. Since the early 1900s, medical researchers have sought to determine what appropriate medical care is and how that care should be evaluated. The endeavor to judge medical quality by assessing process and outcome is now a routine procedure in medical practice.1 Perhaps the most widely established form of medical quality assurance is peer review, in which health professional committees assess the work of colleagues through a set of agreed-upon evaluation measures. Because of the legal issues it raises, medical peer review is an area of interest for teachers of health law.