Becker's Hospital Review

39 39 CEO/STRATEGY Whistle-blower: Steward Health Care restricted referrals, compromised care to keep patients in network By Ayla Ellison A physician filed a whistle-blower lawsuit against Boston-based Steward Health Care, alleging the health system put signifi- cant personal pressure on him and other physicians to refer patients only to Steward hospitals and specialists, according to e Boston Globe. Here are seven things to know about the lawsuit, which is pending in Suffolk Superior Court: 1. In his lawsuit, Stephen Zappala, MD, a urologist, claims Steward representatives would cancel appointments his office made for pa- tients at Burlington, Mass.-based Lahey Hospital & Medical Center, Bos- ton-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and other competing hospitals. 2. e 35-page lawsuit further alleges Steward representatives lied to patients. Dr. Zappala claims health system representatives would call his patients and incorrectly tell them they were required to have their operations at a Steward facility, even when Dr. Zappala had recom- mended another hospital, according to the report. 3. During a court hearing in March, Callan Stein, an attorney for Stew- ard, and two of the three physicians named as defendants in the law- suit, said policies discouraging referrals are "extremely common" and legal, according to e Boston Globe. However, Dr. Zappala and another physician deposed in the case said Steward's methods were extreme. 4. When Dr. Zappala refused to comply with Steward's policies, the health system allegedly disciplined him for minor offenses. However, Mr. Stein said Dr. Zappala was disciplined for legitimate infractions, including being out of town when a hospitalized patient needed him. Steward eventually terminated Dr. Zappala's privileges to operate at Steward Holy Family Hospital in Methuen, Mass. 5. Dr. Zappala said he referred patients to hospitals outside of Stew- ard's network for innovative procedures. For example, Dr. Zappala said he referred patients to Dana-Farber for an operation in which surgeons removed only part of a patient's cancerous kidney. He be- lieved this operation was less risky than the operation Steward sur- geons routinely performed, in which they removed the entire kidney. Steward allegedly refused to approve these referrals. "We clearly compromised their care to keep them in the network," Dr. Zappala told e Boston Globe. 6. Claudia Gabrielle, MD, another former Steward physician who was recently deposed in the case, said Steward would publicly shame phy- sicians who refused to comply with its strict referral policy. Hospital executives allegedly projected physicians' names onto a screen during meetings. Listed alongside each physician's name was the number of patients who had gone out-of-network for care. 7. Steward and the physicians named as defendants in the case deny the allegations. ey recently asked Judge Elizabeth Fahey to dismiss the lawsuit. e judge denied the request in April. n Ex-employees sue shuttered Texas hospital for abrupt closure By Alyssa Rege T wo former Webster, Tex- as-based Bay Area Region- al Medical Center employ- ees filed a class-action lawsuit against the hospital and its parent company May 7, claiming the institutions violat- ed the law by failing to provide suffi- cient notice of the hospital's closure, which occured May 10. Bay Area Regional officials and the hospital's parent company, Hous- ton-based Medistar, announced the closure of the 191-bed hospital and officials' intent to file for bankruptcy May 4. Approximately 900 employees were affected by the closure. In the lawsuit, obtained by Becker's Hospital Review, the two employees allege Bay Area Regional and Medistar violated the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1988 by "failing to give … at least 60 days' ad- vance written notice of termination, as required under the WARN Act." Because of the violation, the em- ployees are entitled to their wages and retirement benefits for 60 days, "none of which [have] been paid," the employees allege in the lawsuit. A lead attorney on the lawsuit told Click 2 Houston because of the lawsuit's class-action status, any em- ployee who discovered they were ter- minated without cause May 4 can join the lawsuit. "[With] any corporation with more than 100 employees, you're supposed to get 60-day notice and obviously we didn't get 60 days' notice," one of the plaintiffs in the case told Click 2 Hous- ton. "We're not looking to get rich. We're just looking for something we should have got in the first place." n

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