Physician beats $100,000 EMTALA ruling on appeal
Physician beats $100,000 EMTALA ruling on appeal
A U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cleared Theodore Cherukuri, MD, FACS, a physician in Williamson, KY, of the charge of violating the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), setting aside a $100,000 fine levied against him by an administrative law judge.
The verdict represents a stinging defeat for federal investigators with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), who had pursued the Cherukuri case since 1991.
Investigators from HHS alleged that Cherukuri violated EMTALA, which prohibits patient dumping, by transferring two patients from a rural facility to an urban hospital across state lines without adequately tending to their injuries. One of the patients died.
The defense argued, however, that Cherukuri simply did not have the tools at his disposal to adequately treat the patient’s injuries at the rural hospital.
"The administrative law judge said Dr. Cherukuri had no business transferring those patients without having controlled the hemorrhage in their abdomen — but at his facility, he had no anesthesiologist to put them to sleep," says Gerald O. Strauch, MD, director of the trauma department at of the American College of Surgeons (ACS) in Chicago.
The ACS filed a friend of the court brief on Cherukuri’s behalf, as did the Washington, DC-based American College of Physicians-American Society of Internal Medicine. "Here was a surgeon trying his darndest to do an almost impossible job of patient care," Strauch says. "The issue was quite clear in terms of how responsible he was in his actions."
Strauch says the ruling by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals should put HHS on notice with regard to how the agency pursues and prosecutes EMTALA cases.
"We don’t have any problem with the anti-dumping legislation," he says. "But for the better part of eight years, this was a situation where the law had sort of run amok. We want to make sure that it’s interpreted so that the wrong people don’t get hurt."
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