Suit claims unnecessary surgeries at Tenet

The action is the most recent development in allegations that doctors at the hospital chain's subsidiary performed unwarranted procedures to boost revenue.

By Katherine Vogt, AMNews staff. May 19, 2003.

Tenet Healthcare Corp., the nation's second largest for-profit hospital chain, is being sued for allegedly creating heart patients out of healthy people as a means of boosting revenue.

A joint complaint representing 82 patients was filed in a Shasta County (Calif.) Superior Court on April 28. The lawsuit claims that doctors at the Redding Medical Center performed hundreds of unnecessary invasive heart procedures -- including some that led to death -- to increase profits at the Tenet subsidiary.

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Tenet, the medical center and a half-dozen physicians are named as defendants in the lawsuit, which seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages for fraud, battery, conspiracy, wrongful death, abuse, negligence and more.

Attorney Robert Simpson, who filed the complaint, said Tenet's business practices were behind the alleged wrongdoing. "We believe that the Tenet health system practices what we call 'Wall Street medicine;' They practice bottom-line medicine to drive their stock prices up."

Simpson said he expects hundreds of additional patients to file claims in the next few months.

A spokesman for Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Tenet declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing a company policy about pending litigation.

The FBI is investigating two of the Redding cardiologists.

The lawsuit is the latest in a series of woes for Tenet. The U.S. Justice Dept. sued the company on Jan. 9, saying it overbilled Medicare by submitting claims with inflated diagnostic codes. The government also launched a probe in December 2002 into whether a San Diego hospital had paid kickbacks to doctors or violated physician recruitment laws.

On April 17, Tenet announced that it had received a civil subpoena seeking documents related to its agreements with a physician group affiliated with five Tenet hospitals in Nevada and California. Company spokesman Steven Campanini said the subpoena from the Office of the Inspector General in the Dept. of Health and Human Services was a routine matter.

"This type of subpoena is a subpoena that occurs frequently in the hospital industry," Campanini said. "Tenet chose to make the announcement because we are under the microscope. This is not related to quality or patient care issues." He declined to provide other details.

Tenet, which owns and operates 114 hospitals, announced last month that it would replace its board chair and one-third of its board to help address the concerns of shareholders.

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Copyright 2003 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.