Phillip Tibbs, M.d. v. Hon. Kimberly N. Bunnell, (judge, Fayette Circuit Court), and Estate of Luvetta Goff, Real…

Summary

The Kentucky Supreme Court held that the federal patient-safety privilege does not protect information normally required to be created and maintained in state-mandated hospital incident reports, even when the information is entered into a hospital’s patient safety evaluation system. The court rejected the lower appellate court’s “self-examining analysis” limitation, adopted a statutory-text-based approach, and remanded for in camera separation of discoverable incident-report information from any genuinely privileged material. Justice Abramson, dissenting, would have protected the report within the patient-safety system and required the estate to pursue any missing state-mandated report through other remedies.