HOUSTON (CN) – A Texas hospital system defamed a heart surgeon and ruined his practice by sharing skewed mortality data with his colleagues, a state appeals court ruled Thursday, upholding a $6 million jury award.
Dr. Miguel Gomez sued Memorial Hermann Health System in 2012 in Harris County District Court, seeking punitive damages for business disparagement, defamation, tortious interference and restraint of trade.
Gomez said in the lawsuit that after he told Memorial Hermann’s then-CEO Keith Alexander he was concerned about the declining patient care at its hospital in Memorial City, a Houston business district, and threatened to move his practice to The Methodist Hospital, Alexander destroyed his reputation.
Gomez started practicing at the hospital in Memorial City in 1998 and his success with robotic heart surgeries earned him the respect of colleagues.
His wife Jennifer Gomez testified in 2017, in a three-month trial, that during Gomez’s first 11 years as a heart surgeon, “He loved his work. He really loved his job.” He loved it so much Jennifer saw his career as a “gift from God,” she said.
But his reputation took a major hit in 2009 after Memorial Hermann, pushed by federal government efforts to improve hospital transparency, launched a program to scrutinize its doctors’ patient outcomes.
It hired Byron Auzenne to lead its heart service and made him the point man on reviewing heart doctors’ mortality rates, according to the case record, as recounted in Thursday’s order written by Texas First Court of Appeals Judge Evelyn Keyes.
The Society of Thoracic Surgeons compiles a database that’s the national benchmark for heart surgeon quality assessment, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. It adjusts heart surgeon’s mortality rates based on seven “risk-adjusted procedures,” such as if the patient has suffered a major stroke, has an infection, kidney failure, or is obese.
Gomez testified that his partner at the time, Dr. Don Gibson, told him in September 2009 that Memorial Hermann’s data showed Gomez had a high mortality rate and it was concerned the government would shut down the cardiovascular department.
He said Gibson told him “because of those reasons you’re going to be suspended or you’re going to be proctored” – monitored by other doctors during surgery, according to the ruling.
Gomez testified that conversation left him in a state of shock. But he attributed the high mortality rate to the hospital’s use of raw data, which he told Auzenne was invalid because it was not risk-adjusted.
Dr. Rick Ngo, chair of the hospital’s surgical peer review committee, testified that after a months-long review of the data his committee found there was no need to suspend the privileges of any of the hospital’s four heart surgeons, or for any proctoring.
Ngo said he also told Auzenne to stop using flawed data that did not adjust for risk on a patient-by-patient basis.
Gomez said on the witness stand he thought his name had been cleared, but hospital administrators again cited misleading data at a meeting in November 2011.
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