$4M for Failure to Diagnose Disease
An Atlantic County jury handed up a $4 million verdict on May 31 in a medical malpractice suit over a casino worker's fatal heart attack, but a high-low agreement will cap recovery at $800,000. Amilcan Rodriguez died while being airlifted from Newcomb Medical Center in Vineland to Presbyterian Hospital in Philadelphia for an emergency cardiac catheterization.
Rodriguez's estate sued their primary care physician Jodi Abramowitz and a consulting cardiologist Mahesh Ghayal. The jury found that for the 14 months Rodriguez was her patient, Abramowitz failed to diagnose his coronary artery disease. At one point, she diagnosed him as suffering from malignant hypertension yet sent him home.
But the jury also found Rodriguez 20 percent liable for having delayed a visit to the cardiologist for six weeks after Abramowitz told him to go.
Expert witnesses on both sides testified that he done so, he could have undergone life saving arterial bypass surgery. When Rodriguez finally saw Ghayal for a consultation, he conducted a EKG, found mildly abnormal readings and scheduled a follow-up stress test and EKG for a date three weeks later.
Rodriguez was hospitalized and died three days after his visit with Ghayal, but the jury found Ghayal did not deviate from the proper standard of care in his reading of the EKG or int he post diagnosis procedure he ordered. The jury assessed damages against him in the amount of 2 million for Rodriguez's pain and suffering and 2 million for the loss suffered by his surviving adult children.
(This information appeared in the New Jersey Law Journal)
