Whistleblower Pathologist at U Kansas Accuses Chair of Misdiagnosis and Cover-up in Lawsuit

[Euchromatin]

http://kcur.org/post/whistleblower-lawsuit-claims-misdiagnosis-cover-ku-hospital#stream/0

http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article87261947.html

Second article actually has the text of the lawsuit, which is probably somewhat more informative than it is intended to be (the specific organ in question isn't named, but "acinar and islet cells" are mentioned at one point). It sounds as though the chair of the department overcalled malignancy on some sort of pancreatic cytology specimen and then tried to cover it up when no malignancy was identified in the resection by merely amending the original case to state it correlated with the resection. Other than taking the chair off of cytopath duties, it doesn't sound like anything else was done, even when the whistleblower pathologist went to hospital administration and risk management. The whistleblower postulates that the patient may not know that they never actually had cancer.

Yowza

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[tiredguy]

It sounds as if this happened in the background of a lot of politics, considering that the whistleblower had recently been relieved of being pathology chair and the current chair replaced him. His pursuit of the matter led to "retaliation" against him, and while he states that he doesn't need his job anymore, he cares enough to file this lawsuit which I presume is his form of retaliation against the hospital.

It sounds like the current chair misdiagnosed benign acinar cells as a neuroendocrine cells (PanNET) from how I read it, and I can imagine someone doing that though I would hope not an experienced cytopathologist.

He also accuses her of signing other pathologists on the report even though they disagreed with her original diagnosis.

Reviewing the slides and amending the report to benign is the correct thing to do, to record the error and erase concern that the surgery missed a neoplasm. It's unclear what else is meant by her "adding" information to the patient records to cover things up. At that point the surgeon has to be the one to cover up the resection diagnosis from the patient. It will be interesting to know what the patient was told after surgery, and when.

 

[Johnny Sunshine]

I agree the situation seems muggy. While unethical behavior should be dealt with harshly, I hope a proper and fair investigation is done. It's easy for people to just grab pitchforks and torches.

It's not uncommon for no residual tumor to be found upon resection after a biopsy, especially if chemo and/or radiation was received beforehand. Sometimes, even just the biopsy itself obliterates all cancer from the resulting inflammation and healing (though, that's less likely in an FNA). He says she "signed" other pathologists' names to the report, but that seems very unlikely. I suspect she was merely making a note that she showed it to others. Though, if their differing opinions were not mentioned in the report, that would seem to be misleading. Amending reports after resection is nothing new, and the phrase "correlates with the original specimen" is the usual patter. This would seem to be a pretty seriously error if the phrase was used in this case of course, but I'm not sure it amounts to a "cover up".

An interesting case to follow, and I'm sure there are lessons here to be learned from. Depending on how the lawsuit goes though, this whistleblower may regret saying he doesn't need his job anymore. Slander/libel cases can be pretty hairy. 😛