A settlement agreement was reached last month in dozens of lawsuits that claimed the former director of Raleigh General Hospital's cardiac unit routinely performed unnecessary procedures on patients.
Nearly 90 lawsuits had been filed against Raleigh General Hospital, LifePoint Hospitals (the company that owns Raleigh General) and Dr. Donald Kenneth Glaser, the former director of the cardiac unit at the Beckley hospital.
Details about the agreement are not public. Charleston lawyer Ben Salango, who represents plaintiffs in the case, would only confirm Monday that an agreement had been made.
"The matter has been resolved and I am not permitted to make further comment," Salango said.
No one representing the hospital could be reached Monday afternoon for comment. A report filed by Lifepoint late last month with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission also confirms the settlement.
The report, while it doesn't provide an exact amount, states that the lawsuits involving the allegations against Glaser and the Beckley hospital, along with similar allegations in a smaller number of lawsuits filed against one of the company's hospital's in Alabama, are under $25 million, which is what the company planned for.
The SEC report states that an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice into Raleigh General also has come to an end.
In September 2013, officials from two LifePoint hospitals, Raleigh General and Vaughan Regional Medical Center, in Selma, Alabama, voluntarily contacted the U.S. Department of Justice and disclosed allegations being brought against two of its cardiologists - Glaser and another from the Alabama hospital. The hospital also began calling and writing letters to former patients of Glasser and indicating they may have received a procedure that was not medically necessary.
Raleigh General recruited Glaser from Boca Raton, Florida, to serve as director of the hospital's push to offer advanced cardiac care to compete against Charleston Area Medical Center. Under Glaser's watch, the number of cardiac catheterization procedures increased from 350 a year to 2,100 a year from 2009 to 2012, according to filings by the plaintiffs. Nurses complained that Glaser was sleeping in patient rooms and operating on patients 18 to 21 hours a day.
Lawyers for the hospital were set to argue before the West Virginia Supreme Court on Jan. 17 but rescinded their appeal of a ruling made by Raleigh Circuit Judge H.L. Kirkpatrick. The judge last year granted a motion by lawyers representing former patients of the hospital and their families to make public a five-year-old letter written by Glaser's former colleague to the hospital CEO.
The lawsuits alleged that hospital officials knew about Glaser's misconduct for about five years before informing patients they could have had an unnecessary procedure by Glaser. Glaser's former colleague at Raleigh General, Dr. Marcus Sodums, now of New York, wrote to Raleigh General's CEO in 2012 about concerns over unnecessary procedures being conducted and concerns about the safety of Glaser's patients, according to Kirkpatrick's ruling.
Lawyers for the hospital planned to argue that the letter is protected by peer review privileges. The judge pointed out that Sodums confirmed in his deposition that he never took part in a peer review while at the hospital in Beckley, and that no one had instructed him to write the letter.
The lawsuits claimed that Glaser and Raleigh General, plus LifePoint, organized a scheme to generate revenue that involved patients undergoing unnecessary procedures including, among others, cardiac catheterizations and angioplasties.
Plaintiffs also claimed that hospital officials should have been suspicious of Glaser as early as 2010. That's when nursing staff members in the cardiac unit allegedly began complaining to hospital administrators about the volume and medical necessity of the procedures Glaser was performing.
Sodums testified during a deposition last year that he became concerned about Glaser in 2010 after first noticing his colleague was mischaracterizing, among other things, the severity of chest pain experienced by patients.
Reach Kate White at kate.white@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1723 or follow @KateLWhite on Twitter.