Another black eye for
UMDNJ
From thnt.com Online,
Posted June 4, from the Web, March 6, 2008
It has been known for some months
that several cardiologists associated with the University of Medicine and
Dentistry of New Jersey apparently had been given money for nothing more than
referring their patients for treatment at University Hospital in Newark.
Prosecutors said Bakul Desai, 55, and Laxmipathi Garipalli, 59, had provided
virtually no services to the hospital while in their no-show jobs.
Still, when the two doctors pleaded guilty last Thursday, the starkness of the
agreement between the men and the hospital was the sort to keep patients awake
at night. The men admitted they had been paid large sums of money —
$840,000 between the two of them — to send their patients to University
Hospital. The hospital's cardiac surgery was in trouble, both for
performing two few operations and for too many bad outcomes.
It is difficult to know which of the two groups is more abhorrent: doctors
who would knowingly send their patients to a hospital they presumably knew was
not the best qualified to handle them; or a university hospital — the state's
largest public hospital, and one given the task of training many of its future
medical professionals — that would set out to buy itself patients.
The hospital's poor performance was no secret: New Jersey had threatened
to pull its funding and its accreditation because the hospital was not reaching
a minimum number of patients as early as 1995. The pay to the doctors
began in 2003. By then studies were beginning to surface that showed
patients fared better when they underwent heart surgery at hospitals that
performed large numbers of them. Doctors who performed more than 50
operations a year were the most successful.
In 2006, a published report ranked hospitals in New York and North Jersey on the
number of operations performed. UMDNJ was fourth from the last in the
ranking. Among New Jersey hospitals it was ahead only of Englewood
Hospital, which had started doing surgeries only several years earlier.
UMDNJ performed only 144 operations in the year studied, with just two surgeons
clocking more than 50. At the same time, the state's annual report card on
cardiac surgery showed the hospital continually lagging behind its peers in both
patients served and in patient outcomes.
In other words, the doctors did a grave disservice to their patients.
Their misdeeds are surpassed only by the medical school and its hospital, which
for years has abused its home state, its home city, its patients, and its
students. It is hard to fathom a disgrace so deep.
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