A Massachusetts multispecialty center has dodged a malpractice suit after a patient didn’t learn she had multiple sclerosis until eight years after the initial MRI.
Appeals court judges reached their decision on March 1, citing the state’s hard seven-year deadline for filing a malpractice suit. Plaintiff Joan Moran first visited the New England Regional Headache Center in October 2011 for migraines and received a magnetic resonance imaging scan the same month.
A few days later, a radiologist wrote a report, indicating she likely had MS and sent it to the Worchester, Massachusetts, center the same day. However, at subsequent visits, the headache center never informed her that she needed to be monitored or receive treatment for disease, according to court documents.
Moran was last seen by the defendants in July 2013, when she received a prescription for migraine medication. In September 2019, she visited a neurologist and was diagnosed with a progressive form of MS, with her condition deteriorating during the eight previous years.
Plaintiff attorneys filed suit in October 2019 claiming malpractice. They charged that, because of the ongoing treatment ending in 2013, Moran was within the seven-year “repose period” allowed by Massachusetts. However, the three-judge panel said that the case stemmed from the original MRI and failure to share the October 2011 diagnosis.
“Moran's claim is without merit because the negligence alleged in the complaint is that the defendants neither advised her that she needed to be monitored for her progressive multiple sclerosis, nor did they set in motion a plan for responsible care and treatment of her condition by a multiple sclerosis specialist,” the opinion states. “Even if we generously read the complaint to have alleged separate acts of negligence, that reading would nonetheless be eclipsed by the fact that the ‘definitely established event’ of the MRI occurred nearly eight years before the complaint was filed,” they added later.
Bloomberg Law first reported news of the decision. Read more from them below (subscription required).
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.