$2M settlement after subpoena of radiologist’s keystrokes finds lax CT reading
Lawyers recently extracted a $2 million settlement from one Dallas-based hospital chain after a subpoena proved that radiologist Steven Fuhr spent less than a second interpreting CT images.
The legal team first filed suit against Tenet Healthcare in April 2017 on behalf of widow Georgie Burstein. They claimed the radiologist was lax in his duties and failed to spot bleeding in her husband's brain, leading to the 64-year-old Florida man’s eventual death. “Smoking gun” evidence helped turn the case after attorneys subpoenaed the head of radiology at Fuhr’s hospital.
They found he had received nearly 700 images of the retiree Leonard Burstein’s brain, but spent only six and a half minutes interpreting them, the Daily Business Review reported Jan. 17.
“If we were to assume that he did nothing but open them up and immediately start reading them, he spent half a second looking at each image. That’s two images per second, and that is insanity,” Todd Falzone, a partner with law firm Kelley/Uustal, told the publication.
Burstein had banged his head on a filing cabinet while trying to tie his shoe in January 2015, and was taking blood-thinning meds at the time, placing him at real risk of brain hemorrhage, the firm noted. Paramedics transported the patient to West Boca Medical Center—a Tenet hospital in Palm Springs, Florida—where a physician ordered CT scans. Fuhr interpreted those tests at another Tenet hospital, with special instructions that Burstein’s meds presented extra danger of brain injury.
The radiologist, however, found no hemorrhaging and the hospital discharged the patient 15 minutes later, according to the report. His condition worsened, and eventually Burstein ended up back in a different hospital, where a different radiologist discovered massive internal bleeding in the brain. Burstein died the next day.
The suit accused Tenet Healthcare, Fuhr and his employer Sheridan Radiology Services of South Florida of negligence. Defense attorneys, meanwhile, have denied any wrongdoing, claiming Burstein’s own negligence led to his death. The parties settled the matter out of court Nov. 14, days before trial, for $2 million.
Read more in the Daily Business Review.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.