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Senior Trial Partner, Michael A.  Sonkin, with the assistance of Associates John A. Rohan and Shannon L. Stewart, successfully defended MCB’s client hospital against allegations of medical malpractice, culminating in a defense verdict in the Bronx Supreme Court after a two and a half week trial.  

The 22-year-old decedent presented to the Emergency Room of MCB’s insured hospital reporting chest pain after an episode of nausea and vomiting at home.  Upon arrival to the ER, a screening EKG was performed, which was negative for a STEMI or arrhythmia and was essentially normal, except for a mildly prolonged QT interval.  The patient was triaged and assigned to a non-acute team, where she waited to be seen by an ER physician. After an extended wait of 10 hours - during which time she was monitored by nurses on three occasions and found to be stable - she suffered a cardiac arrest. The arrest was quickly recognized and responded to, with successful resuscitation occurring within six minutes with no resulting neurologic sequelae. As a result of the arrest, cardiac testing was conducted, leading to the discovery of an underlying dilated cardiomyopathy that was previously unknown.  Over the next two years, the patient’s heart failure symptoms from the cardiomyopathy were managed with mixed success until she died suddenly two years later.

At trial, �г��ٸ�successfully argued that any claim suggesting the hospital caused the decedent’s death should be precluded, as there was no wrongful death claim filed. Moreover, it would be speculative to claim the arrest from two years earlier caused or contributed to her death, particularly since she died in her sleep and no autopsy was ever performed. The primary alleged departure presented to the jury was of a failure to initiate continuous cardiac monitoring based on the claimed long QT discovered during the plaintiff’s triage. However, the defense was able to convince the jury that the patient’s elongated QT was only “borderline”, with low risk for arrhythmia and arrest, and did not warrant continuous heart monitoring. Additionally, the patient’s symptoms had improved over the 10 hours she waited to be seen, and that her arrest was actually caused by then-unknown dilated cardiomyopathy and not her borderline QT. The plaintiff intimated to the jury he was seeking a verdict in the amount of $10 million. After just one hour of deliberation, the jury returned a unanimous verdict in favor of the defense.

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