As I said yesterday, this story has gotten away from UT Southwestern administration, and now, with the Chronicle of Higher Education's and Inside Higher Ed's reporting on the scandal, people are reading about UT Southwestern's resident woes from coast to coast.
The newspaper said its review of records and interviews with current and former staff members of the medical center and the hospital, Parkland Memorial, suggested a near reversal of power between residents and the faculty members who oversee them at Parkland.
This news release on the Androvett Legal Media and Marketing website doesn't give a lot of new information, but it does provide a little different perspective. I think Larry Gentilello is making a lot more headway and a lot more publicity than UT ever thought he would.
“This is a case of a doctor standing up for patients and being shot down by the medical community,” says Ms. Aldous. “Dr. Gentilello wanted to make sure that all patients at Parkland received the best treatment, but UT Southwestern and Parkland officials apparently have a different view of the practice of medicine.”
The whistleblower protection clause is one of the strongest protection clauses in federal law. It not only protects the relator but anyone who investigates, initiates, testifies in furtherance of, or assists in a case. In Section 3730(h), whistleblowers who have proven harassment are entitled to "all necessary relief necessary to make the employee whole" including "reinstatement with the same seniority status... two times the amount of back pay, interest on any back pay, and compensation for any special damages." This clause not only helps the relator keep their job if they are still employed while the case is proceeding, but also makes a company think twice about harassing any employees who cooperate with exposing the fraud. Unfortunately, this clause does not help subcontractors and independent contractors who want to cooperate with the investigation.
Back in May, a federal jury told UT Southwestern Medical Center to pay more than $3.6 million to a doctor who said he faced racial discrimination and retaliation after resisting pressure to commit billing fraud.
Now a state appeals court has put another doctor employed by the Dallas medical school, Larry Gentilello (right), a big step closer to getting similar allegations in front of jurors.
UT attorneys actually tried to claim that an employee or faculty member could not be protected by the Whistleblower Act if he or she reported an issue internally (never mind an internal policy prohibiting retaliation). Apparently, UT wants employees to go outside of any UT component to report an issue, which would seem to me to be shooting itself squarely in the foot. It would be much more advantageous for any outfit to find out about noncompliance issues internally so that the it could at least do some damage control before the Feds get involved. This astounding contention by UT would have the feds involved from the get-go. (Hey! Attorneys really will burn down a place in order to save it.) As the opinion below indicates, the court did not buy the UT notion in its motion. Gentilello's case is alive and well.
According to UT Southwestern, Rege could not "regulate under" or "enforce" Medicare or Medicaid rules and regulations because he could not himself write the rules or impose fines or criminal liability under those rules and regulations. However, unlike the DWI statute at issue in Needham, the statutes at issue here specifically charge UT Southwestern and its physicians with implementing the laws at the hospital level. While Rege may not have had the power to write the rules or assess fines or other criminal sanctions for a violation of the rules, he had both the power and the duty to enforce those rules and regulations at UT Southwestern. Rege specifically testified that he had the ability to decide whether UT Southwestern could bill Medicare or Medicaid or not. There was also evidence that he could immediately stop any procedure in violation of the applicable rules and regulations and discipline an offending physician. Rege conceded at the hearing that he enforced the laws insofar as he set policies and procedures for Medicare and Medicaid compliance. He also conceded that he had the ability to "regulate, enforce, and investigate any irregular billings." Rege also testified that he had the authority to enforce faculty supervision on residents.
Although this is not an academic facility, this episode is, nonetheless, instructive concerning whistleblowing. Note that the whistleblowers got fired even though everything seems to indicate they were right. Very often, whistleblowers have to attain personal justice after the fact.
July 15, 2010 — The Texas Medical Board (TMB) has charged a family physician at the center of a nationally publicized whistle-blower case involving 2 nurses with poor medical judgment, nontherapeutic prescribing, failure to maintain adequate records, overbilling, witness intimidation, and other violations.
The charges follow a report that the 2 nurses — Anne Mitchell, RN, and Vickilyn Galle, RN — made anonymously to the TMB last year about patient care rendered by Rolando Arafiles, Jr, MD, at Winkler County Memorial Hospital in Kermit, Texas, where the 2 nurses and Dr. Arafiles worked.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has even noticed the Texas A&M whistleblower lawsuit recently filed. The Chronicles' readers have some pretty lively things to say, too. They are worth a read, not only for this case, but for other Texas A&M gaffes. For instance, one commenter claims that the A&M vice president who had to resign after falsely claiming a doctorate and service as a Navy seal departed with a "generous" severance package.
I agree with #s 6 and 7. Stripping one's administrative position is a lawful termination, but stripping tenure as well is termination with extreme prejudice. And don't think for a minute that this is the end. Hash is being dared to speak out again, at which point he will be terminated, period. Shared governance is in rough shape at TAMU, but what's really sad is that it is a situation not all that far from the norm.
In March, Hash lodged an ethics complaint through the university system's hot line and the state's Office of Inspector General abuse and fraud reporting system , according to court documents. A few days later, Hash was relieved of his vice dean job and was demoted to associate professor without tenure, the suit says. The letter to Hash from the dean of the Health Science Center says his performance in the role was unsatisfactory.
I have to wonder what sort of "due process" Texas A&M administrators gave to this tenured professor before they took his tenure away. The article, linked below, says they got around to giving it back to him later.
Hash in 2008 became vice dean of academic affairs and associate professor with tenure. The suit says Hash later learned that "certain high level employees/officers of the defendants and/or their family members had financial interests" in the medical building.
Recruiting top-notch scientists to Texas has been difficult, Shine
said, because of a perception in the outside world that Texas is
unreceptive toward such science-related issues as evolution and climate
change.
Of course, this absolves UT and its component institutions of any blame whatsoever, doesn't it? Why, it's the fault of the citizens of Texas, according to this theory, not anything that UT's administrators have done. What a self-serving little theory.
An inconvenient truth concerning the global warming and evolution excuses, however, is that there is a little more to the story. UT has taken action against faculty that has gotten national attention. Perhaps the most visible of these actions involved the reduction in force the UT system sanctioned and the UTMB administration carried out against faculty in 2008, recently resulting in a censure from the AAUP. Utterly failing to involve faculty governance in the process except as window dressing toward the end, UTMB administration employed a stacked RIF selection committee and a stacked RIF appeals committee to carry out its agenda. On average, the selection committee, which included the Provost's neighbor and a disproportionate number of people from the Provost's former department before his promotion, had about eight minutes to consider the careers of faculty being considered for a cut. It is impossible to digest a substantial curriculum vita in only eight minutes, much less the volumes of other information that these faculty generated throughout their careers. Of course faculty names had been presented to the committee by chairs, who had largely already made the decisions.
As for the RIF appeals committee, it was uniformly staffed with management personnel who also held faculty appointments. (UTMB President David Callender holds a faculty appointment.) This committee only upheld about three appeals, and one successful appellant's contract was not renewed a month later, making the whole process meaningless for him.
Then there are the well-publicized cases in which UT has crushed dissent, such as Dr. Larry Gentilello's concerns that UT Southwestern was not in conformance with Medicare rules. He was the chair of a department until he made his concerns known to UT Southwestern management (not a third party), and suddenly found himself demoted and his pay cut. (More about UT Southwestern and its Medicare problems can be found on the blog UT Southwestern and Parkland Hospital Stories. (See additional stories concerning this in the Zemanta box below.) Dr. Gentilello's case is still under way and on appeal right now.
Click on the highlighted text to read about similar cases involving Dr. Robert Klebe of UTHSC San Antonio, and Dr. Naiel Nassar, yet another unfortunate instance occurring at UT Southwestern. Dr. Klebe's case is still ongoing with UT appealing to the Fifth Circuit in May after having lost two separate jury awards in favor of Doctor Klebe of $900,000 and $400,000, and UT has vowed to appeal Doctor Nasser's case after a jury awarded him $3.6 million dollars.
No, there's more than evolution and global warming going on here. UT needs to stop looking at Charles Darwin and Al Gore and start looking in the mirror for the root of its problems. Of course, all that hot air accompanying its excuses may well be contributing to global warming.
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