Hrayr Shahinian News : Feud between Cedars-Sinai and surgeon puts focus on patient safety

Oct. 11, 2010 - PRLog -- April 06, 2010|By Alan Zarembo - After doctors in Florida failed to remove his deep-seated brain tumor, Marc Kotolnick traveled to Los Angeles to see Dr. Hrayr Shahinian, a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and a star in the emerging field of minimally invasive brain surgery.

Shahinian cut through Kotolnick's eyebrow, drilled a hole into his skull and laced an endoscope into his brain. But when a delicate pair of forceps failed, the surgeon aborted the operation. There was no functioning spare set on hand.

The May 2005 incident resulted in a lawsuit, which Cedars-Sinai resolved in a confidential settlement.

The case, however, was part of a wider problem: A long-running conflict between hospital administrators and Hrayr Shahinian culminated in its own lawsuit after he stopped working there in late 2005. An arbitrator in that case ruled last November that the hospital had forced him out by improperly restricting his ability to perform surgeries.

The arbitrator, Linda Klibanow, ordered the hospital to pay Hrayr Shahinian $4.7 million, including $2.6 million in punitive damages meant to deter the hospital from retaliating against doctors who voice concerns about patient safety. (Both sides had agreed to binding arbitration.)

The fight isn't over. In legal filings late last month, Cedars-Sinai indicated it will challenge the decision in the state Court of Appeal. A lawyer for the hospital, Raymond Thomas, said patient safety was never compromised.

The arbitrator disagreed. In her 130-page decision, she wrote that despite pleas from the doctor and operating room staff for more surgical tools, Cedars-Sinai for years "displayed a disregard for health and safety of patients by not providing adequate redundancy of instruments for Hrayr Shahinian's surgeries."

In response to Cedars-Sinai's argument that the problems with Hrayr Shahinian were unique, Klibanow cited two other high-profile safety problems at the prestigious hospital: In November 2007, the newborn twins of actor Dennis Quaid, as well as another child, were given 1,000 times the intended dosage of a blood thinner. And last fall, state and federal authorities launched an investigation into radiation overdoses from CT brain perfusion scans. Over an 18-month period, 260 patients received up to eight times the normal radiation because the hospital staff had misunderstood a default setting on the machine, according to Cedars-Sinai officials.

For the Full Story Please Visit: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/06/local/la-me-cedar...

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Hrayr Shahinian, M.D. is regarded as a pioneer in the field of medicine for his revolutionary use of minimally invasive endoscopy in performing skull base surgery.