Former patient of bungling breast radiologist: ‘He got a slap on the wrist, I got a slap in the face’
A state medical board is coming under fire for failing to revoke the license of a radiologist who allegedly missed 24 breast cancers over three years.
Some critics, including patients, are especially incensed over 11 of these cases.
That’s because the public profile of those cases has somehow remained low despite a 2020 malpractice settlement totaling $4.6 million—and despite their being preceded by two similarly settled cases involving the same radiologist in another state.
The main players in the troubling chronicle are Mark Guilfoyle, DO, and the New Hampshire Board of Medicine.
An investigative team at the Boston Globe broke the story over the weekend.
The team found the Granite State medical board reprimanded Guilfoyle, fined him $750 and barred him from reading breast imaging.
However, when it allowed him to remain licensed, Guilfoyle relocated to Michigan—the state in which those two previous suits were settled—and he appears to be practicing there now.
(An outdated Doximity profile shows Guilfoyle’s New Hampshire practice. It also lists his other states of license as Georgia, Idaho, Ioway, Kentucky, Vermont and Washington State.)
The Globe article presents firsthand accounts from some former patients of Guilfoyle.
One, Cheryl Jensen of Bethlehem, N.H., says Guilfoyle’s misreads of her mammograms gave her tumor time to spread to her lymph nodes. Once the cancer was finally diagnosed, she underwent surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy.
Jensen is understandably upset with Guilfoyle—“he ruined the rest of my life”—yet she reserves her bitterest ire for the New Hampshire Medical Board.
Taking issue with the agency’s “lack of action and transparency,” she tells the Globe that Guilfoyle “got a slap on the wrist, and I got a slap in the face from that Board.”
Meanwhile patient Patricia Eddy, upon learning Guilfoyle was now practicing in Michigan with a focus on other-than-mammography reads, tells the journalists: “I don’t think he should be reading anything.”
Guilfoyle missed Eddy’s breast cancer in three consecutive annual screenings. Eventually she had to have a double mastectomy.
“You’ve got this doctor who was harming innocent patients with his ineptness,” Eddy adds, “and [the New Hampshire Board of Medicine] is doing nothing about it.”
Both patients were seen at rural satellite clinics of Dartmouth Health, which is affiliated with the Geisel School of Medicine in Hanover, N.H.
The Globe team spoke with a Dartmouth Health media representative as well as a former Dartmouth director of breast imaging. Both suggest their institution did its due diligence in policing Guilfoyle’s work and reporting his alleged missteps to the medical board.
The team requested comment from Guilfoyle, but the physician declined through his attorney.
From the Nov. 19 Globe article:
New Hampshire patients have no simple way to learn important information about a physician’s past because the state’s medical board is one of the least transparent in the country. Unlike those in many other states, it does not make public a doctor’s malpractice settlements, hospital disciplinary actions or criminal convictions, the Globe found. … New Hampshire’s board was also identified by Public Citizen, a nonprofit advocacy group, as having the lowest rate of serious disciplinary actions against physicians of any state between 2017 and 2019, the years it studied.”
“What I wanted right from the get-go, I wanted [Guilfoyle’s] license,” Patricia Eddy says. “I was advocating for myself, but I was advocating for every other woman out there who was going to get a mammogram.”
Boston Globe report here (behind paywall) and, as recounted in the U.K. by the Daily Mail, here.
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.