Columbus Reads

Now this was in your file, a frivolous liability case filed against a Dr. Michael A. Banks, in 2007. Did, did you have anything to do with that?$$Right, well, that's what I was talking about, the frivolous lawsuit committee [Ohio State Medical Association Frivolous Lawsuit Committee] that I was involved in, is that what, there were several cases and I'm not sure if this was Dr. Banks' case but there was a case where, one example was, where the physician, the plaintiff, basically, had the plaintiff's lawyer tell the physician's lawyer that, "If you would agree to make a payment to me, even though I know that your physician doesn't have any liability, then we'll release you from the lawsuit." Well that's a very egregious situation right there and, you know, most malpractice companies at the time really didn't have the, the focus to really pursue when those types of situations arose so we were able to put a, you know, kind of shine a spotlight on that kind of conduct and say this is inconsistent with what the standards are in Ohio, you, you know, you cannot do that. And so that was a case where it was found in favor, the one I'm describing, in favor of the physician plaintiff, not the physician plaintiff, I mean, in terms of the physician who brought an allegation of frivolous lawsuit against the lawyer who represented that, that particular plaintiff. That we had another situation where a, a physician, we had another situation where a physician had a name that didn't sound like the typical name that you might hear in Ohio. It wasn't Cooper, it was another name, and the plaintiff's lawyer brought a lawsuit against this physician simply because she had the same last name as the physician who was actually involved in the medical care of the patient and the physician was very upset and she complained and we looked into her case and the lawyer did withdraw the case, but, you know, what people don't understand is once you're named in the case, you have to, you know, notify your company, you have to, you know, the company spends money to get you dismissed and so, you know, those, that, that all adds to the cost and expense of professional liability action. So--$$And adds to the cost of healthcare eventually, right (simultaneous)?$$(Simultaneous) And adds to the cost of healthcare, exactly, exactly. So we were very excited to have some success in, in that arena.$What's been the biggest challenge working f- at Ohio State [The Ohio State University Medical Center; The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Columbus, Ohio]?$$Well, in the last year, probably the single largest challenge I've had, and it's been in the papers so I can talk about it. We did have an unfortunate incident in which there was a mistake in referral of a proficiency test in our clinical laboratory and a proficiency test is a test that's used to validate the testing that is done in the clinical laboratory. It's not, it does not involve a patient, an actual patient, and what happens is that you're supposed to treat that sample just as you would treat a real patient specimen except you do not process it all the way to its natural conclusion but you send it back to the testing authority and in this instance, one of our employees mistakenly referred it, treated it as a patient specimen and referred it to another laboratory. So, in the clinical laboratory world, even though at the time OSU was doing 10 million tests a year and ten thousand of these proficiency tests, there wasn't any flexibility in the way the code of regulations were written to allow CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] to be flexible with the medical center in terms of what kind of penalty would be assessed and, fortunately, during the time, during the nine months or so that this process was going on there was, the TEST Act [Taking Essential Steps for Testing Act of 2012] was passed which did give CMS more flexibility but in addition, we had very excellent outside counsel. I was able to identify the top lawyer at, Hope Foster [Hope S. Foster], who was at the Washington, D.C. law firm of Mintz Levin [Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris Glovsky and Popeo, P.C.], who represented us and through the teamwork, both of the staff and the leadership in the laboratory, with excellent representation, I'm very pleased to say that in the end we were able to resolve the situation with CMS and it did not result in the very severe penalty of not being able to own or operate a clinical laboratory. So, but along the way we discovered a lot of opportunities that we could, that we needed to address as an organization and as a result of that, one of the things is that, in fact, I'm just in the transition of beginning to do this. I'm now the executive director for HHS [health and human services] advocacy, regulatory and quality improvement program so I will be doing more of this type of work to try to assist us as an organization in addressing any issues that we might have that relates to that, that regulatory environment.