Hospital fails to dodge $10M malpractice verdict after attempting to pin payment on radiologist
A Georgia hospital is on the hook for $10 million after it had attempted to pin the jury award on a radiologist who admitted culpability weeks before trial.
The case dates back to September 2018, when retired pediatric nurse Vadona Sorenson, 68 at the time, first visited Atlanta-based Piedmont with suspected bronchitis. Complicated by other underlying conditions, her health worsened leading to intubation and an ICU admission.
Weeks later, providers prepped the woman for transfer to a regular floor. But a speech and language pathologist deemed that Sorenson wasn’t ready for solid food and she needed a feeding tube reinserted, the Daily Report detailed Nov. 20.
Nurse Kara Lehman, however, unknowingly inserted the device into the patient’s trachea and punctured the lung. Two hours later, radiologist Louis Jacobs, MD, subsequently misread an X-ray that would have spotted the injury, but the error was not discovered until six and a half hours later. By then, the patient had suffocated, falling into a coma prior to her death.
Jacobs admitted culpability, forcing plaintiff attorneys to pivot, according to the report.
“It wasn’t a surprise to us that [the radiologist] did that, but one of the largest challenges we had to overcome was navigating how that played with a codefendant in the case pointing the finger at [another] defendant who has admitted negligence to try and lessen their culpability,” Mark Meliski of the Barnes Law Group told the publication.
Piedmont contended that, since Jacobs admitted the mistake, the hospital should not be at fault. However, the jury disagreed, ruling for the eight-figure payout from the hospital to Sorenson’s family.
“It really played into [the plaintiffs’ strategy, with] the radiologist in the case conceding he violated the standard of care, coming to trial, and testifying appropriately [and] the jury understood he was accepting responsibility, whereas Piedmont took the opposite track,” Meliski said.
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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.