Pennsylvania radiologist, hospital must pay $10.8M over allergic reaction to gadolinium, jury rules
A Pennsylvania hospital and its supervising radiologist have been ordered to pay $10.83 million after a former patient experienced a devastating allergic reaction to gadolinium during an MRI exam.
A Blair County jury deliberated for two and a half hours Tuesday before reaching the unanimous decision this week. About $6.2 million of the payout will cover 45-year-old Christopher Carey Miller’s care over the next 30 years, while the remainder will go toward lost earnings, pain and suffering, the Altoona Mirror reported Thursday.
"This trial and the verdict prove that jury trials can safely resume," Miller’s attorney Brendan Lupetin said following the decision, claiming it was one of the largest in the county’s history. "The verdict also proves that if doctors or hospitals are negligent and hurt patients, they won't get a pass just because of the pandemic.”
A spokeswoman for Tyrone Hospital declined to comment when reached by Radiology Business Thursday.
It was back in October of 2016 that Miller first visited the institution—located in Central Pennsylvania, about two hours east of Pittsburgh—for lower back pain. Providers administered an MRI exam using gadolinium. But the patient suffered an allergic reaction, went into cardiac arrest and suffered brain damage leaving him with the mental faculties of a child, the Mirror reported.
Tyrone Hospital did not have a drug box with epinephrine, nor an alarm in the imaging suite. MRI tech Sherry Piper told jurors she ran to the control room 60 feet away to sound the alert and yelled for help down the hallway. Supervising radiologist Kelly Biggs reportedly responded and grabbed an emergency doc to help and eventually the patient was transferred to the emergency department.
The jury assigned 75% of the payout to the hospital while Biggs is reportedly on the hook for the other 25%. An attorney representing the provider did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Read more about the verdict 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.