Hospital system drops lawsuit over radiology employees quitting to join competitor
A Wisconsin hospital system is dropping its lawsuit against a competitor stemming from the departure of several radiology employees, leaders announced Friday.
ThedaCare sued Ascension Northeast Wisconsin late last month, claiming the organization had improperly recruited employees from its Appleton hospital. The Neenah-based, seven-hospital system also earned a temporary restraining order, preventing workers from departing, which a judge lifted last week.
But ThedaCare is ditching the court battle and instead focusing on filling the roles vacated by seven members of its interventional radiology and cardiovascular team. The case had drawn national scrutiny, with coverage by the Washington Post and New York Times, among others.
CEO Imran Andrabi was surprised by the attention, according to a story published Friday in the Appleton Post-Crescent.
“What we were looking for is just some help to orderly transition a large number of people ... from one health system to another,” he told the newspaper. “It just created a huge gap, and we wanted some help in the interim to figure out how to bridge that gap for the community.”
ThedaCare has asked employees who work in similar roles to fill in gaps left by interventional radiology techs and nurses who left. It’s also working with hiring agencies and other health systems, the report noted. The system has spent roughly $11,000 on healthcare training to aid in the transition.
Lawyers from the hospital had argued that Ascension acted improperly by hiring away a batch of specialized workers all at once. Doing so, ThedaCare claimed, would severely hamper its ability to provide around-the-clock interventional care. The seven employees appeared in court last week, testifying they had given ThedaCare an opportunity to counter Ascension’s offer of higher pay and a better work-life balance. But they were reportedly told the short-term cost of losing the IR team was not worth the long-term expense of matching the offer.
Read more from the Post-Crescent below.
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.