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The Lung Cancer That Wasn’t
Added: (Thu Jan 28 2010)
According to Joel Faxon, a lawyer for the New Haven-based firm Stratton Faxon, what happened to Michael Santopietro was a misdiagnosis of the worst kind – and perhaps even more frightening – it didn’t even have to be reported.
In early 2005, doctors at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital wrongly told 62-year-old Michael Santopietro that he had lung cancer, which led to the removal of a portion of his lungs and an eight-day stay in the hospital. He now uses an oxygen tank.
“I was very mad,” Santopietro testified during a malpractice lawsuit he filed. “I went through all this for nothing.”
The hospital later settled for an undisclosed sum, and last May, a jury awarded Santopietro more than $1.5 million in his suit against the hospital’s chief of pathology. But under the current law, the misdiagnosis was not reported to the state Department of Public Health.
“The criteria for reporting an adverse event is so carefully defined now that egregious cases that should require investigations don’t get reported at all,” said Joel Faxon, a lawyer for Stratton Faxon based in New Haven.
In 2002, when Connecticut’s legislature drafted an “adverse event” reporting law, hospitals were required to inform the state Department of Public Health when patients suffered certain serious harm, even if unintended. The legislation was intended to compel hospitals to improve care and help patients assess the quality of the state’s medical facilities. But after hospital lobbyists persuaded lawmakers to rewrite the statute in 2004, limiting the types of adverse events that must be divulged and promising to keep reports secret unless they led to an investigation, the playing field for patients has become a slippery slope with patients faced with an uphill struggle,.
In fact, further refinements in the revised law further narrowed reporting requirements, allowing hospitals to keep more medical mistakes secret even from state regulators, with reports to the state immediately dropping by more than half. Even with these restrictions in place, some believe hospitals still are not reporting all incidents mandated by law, but the state has never attempted to determine whether or not hospitals are complying. “Even egregious cases like Mr. Santopietro’s are difficult to discover under the present set of circumstances,” Faxon concludes.