After spending "twelve years in the wilderness" as one of America's most determined medical whistle blowers, Dr. James Murtagh achieves a legal victory that could change the way U.S. hospitals manage their physicians . . . while also helping to protect the American economy (think jobs ) by protecting due process in court-ordered arbitration proceedings.
ATLANTA -- At first glance, the
recent decision by the Georgia Court of Appeals seemed innocuous enough.
After more than 12 years of
continuing litigation, the Court's finding of last July 26th simply
pointed out that an Atlanta-area physician named James Murtagh was not in contempt of a lower Georgia state
court, after all.
As the Court noted in typical
legalese: "The plaintiff's Emergency Motion for supersedeas is granted. The plaintiff's motion for Expedited Appeal
is denied, and it is ORDERED that the trial court reconsider its order of July
18, 2012. . . ."
Translation: Jim Murtagh, M.D., had
just won a major legal victory in his decade-long struggle to prove that officials
at highly regarded Emory University had inflicted illegal reprisals on him for
daring to blow the whistle on alleged research-funding fraud. In addition, the Appeals Court lectured
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Wendy L. Shoob by informing her that she
didn't understand the term "contempt" . . . and that she had been legally
harassing Dr. Murtagh from the bench for years.
Dr. Murtagh's hugely controversial
whistle blowing had disclosed alleged violations at both Emory and its teaching
hospital, Grady Memorial of Atlanta, starting way back in 1999.
The court battle that followed --
surely one of the great legal struggles of recent years which can be expected to
affect medical practice at American hospitals -- has often focused on a
crucially important question: whether or not hospital authorities can continue
the practice of requiring their doctors to submit to unregulated and often
fraudulent "peer review" evaluations by outside physicians who are sometimes
encouraged by the hospitals to find against the doctors whose performance they
are scrutinizing.
A
bit of background: the record shows clearly that many managed care hospitals
have been using such trumped up, "sham" peer review proceedings as a method for
protecting profits rather than patients.
These ersatz reviews often punish docs who stand up for their patients in
disputes with hospitals . . . or who dare to criticize hospital decision-making
by blowing the whistle on fraud, waste and abuse.
That's
exactly what Jim Murtagh did in 1999, when he agreed to testify about alleged
research funding-fraud at Emory and Grady (and abuse of patients at Grady), to
federal investigators from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who were
looking into allegations of fraud at
both institutions.
Soon after Dr. Murtagh -- a
University of Michigan School of Medicine graduate who's won numerous awards
and citations in his fields of pulmonary and sleep medicine -- confirmed that he
was cooperating with the NIH investigators, he received two rude shocks.
First, he was told that a bogus peer-review
committee at Grady would be looking into charges that he'd been ignoring "Do
Not Resuscitate" orders (a grave medical offense) during his daily shifts in
the Intensive Care Unit at the large urban hospital.
Second, Dr. Murtagh was ordered to
take a sham "psychiatric fitness for duty" examination by Emory's own chosen psychiatrist.
That psychiatrist reportedly wrote up such exams for his clients without even
examining the targeted doctors or gathering factual evidence. Even more startlingly, Murtagh later testified
that he'd never been told what the hearings were about -- and that he wouldn't
be allowed to attend the review procedures or respond to accusations against
him.
Murtagh balked.
Instead of submitting to the
findings of the peer review and taking the psychiatric exam, he sued the
university and claimed that he had been illegally subjected to reprisals as a result
of his whistle blowing about alleged research fraud.
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