St Joseph Stent Cases and Dr. Midei Back in the News – More Cases Revealed

The Baltimore Business Journal just reported online that St. Joseph Medical Center has announced that it is now finished its review of the controversial stent procedures performed by Dr. Mark Midei between May 2007 and mid-2009.

In a statement released to the Baltimore Business Journal, hospital officials had to correct an earlier estimate provided by the hospital’s CEO, Jeff Norman, this past April 19th, when he indicated that the number of unnecessary stent implantations totaled 538. The so-called ‘final’ number, according to the report, is now 47 more than the last figure or a total of 585 patients, who have now been notified that “their blockage may not have been so severe to warrant a stent implanted by Dr. Midei.”    

We have been covering this St. Joe’s stent fiasco since February 20th, when we reported that the US Senate was launching an investigation into this matter.  The news of the congressional investigation followed lawsuits by former patients and a class action filing against the hospital.  On March 10th, we posted a story about a news release of that day in which the hospital reported an additional 169 more patients had received similar notification of unnecessary stenting by Dr. Midei, bringing the number at that time to 538.  Today’s release by the Baltimore Business Journal, as noted, adds a new 47 patients to this list.  Will more ‘review’ yield even more patients, who were, by the hospital’s own admission, subjected to implantations for blockages that “may have not been so severe to warrant a stent…”?  (What lawyer wrote that language for the hospital’s news release?).

To explain the seemingly ever-growing list of patients, the hospital stated “that an initial count of the total number of flagged stent procedures performed by Dr. Midei was “incomplete but has been corrected.

Guess it’s good that they now have the number of  patients corrected.  It would have been a lot better had they gotten the situation corrected before all these patients were submitted to unnecessary treatment with its life-long consequences.