Houston heart surgeons accused of double-booking surgeries

Three Houston medical facilities have agreed to pay $15 million to settle federal allegations that they turned a blind eye for years while three surgeons double-hired complex heart procedures, performing simultaneous operations and leaving behind unqualified residents responsible for unsafe procedures. .

Three doctors – Joseph Coselli, 71, Joseph Lamelas, 63, and David Ott, 77 – “regularly engaged in running two operating rooms at once and delegated key aspects of extremely complicated and risky heart surgeries to unqualified resident physicians,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas said in a statement announcing the settlement.

A 2019 whistleblower complaint sparked an investigation into practices at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center, Baylor College of Medicine and Surgical Associates of Texas. The practice not only violated Medicare regulations but also endangered patient safety during “some of the most complicated operations performed in a hospital,” federal officials said.

“Patients entrusted their lives to these surgeons – undergoing surgeries where a missed cut meant the difference between life and death,” U.S. Attorney Alamdar Hamdani said in the statement. “The patients apparently had no idea their doctor was heading to another operating room.”

Ott has categorically denied the allegations.

“We proved, using hospital records and operating room times, that I was in the operating rooms and performed the operations I requested and therefore I did not “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he told the Houston Chronicle.

At least four patients died during overlapping surgeries under Ott’s auspices, according to the whistleblower lawsuit that started it all, which was unsealed Monday and obtained by the Chronicle. Patients were anesthetized for longer periods and suffered complications.

The surgeons’ insistence that they spent all their time in each office’s operating room conflicted with their schedules. Coselli, for example, at one point had to perform 32 hours of surgery in 16 hours, the Chronicle reported.

That meant they performed two to four times as many surgeries as the average number performed by cardiologists elsewhere in the United States, a volume reflected in their compensation. They earned up to four times more than the average for their specialty, or more than $2 million a year, according to the lawsuit.

The 5,000 simultaneous surgeries they performed over a seven-year period brought the health care institutions more than $150 million in revenue, the Chronicle reported, citing court documents.

The allegations are allegations and not an indication of liability, the U.S. Attorney’s Office noted. The institutions admitted no wrongdoing and said they only agreed to the settlement “to resolve documentation and billing issues” related to Medicare and Medicaid compliance and to save the expense of a lawsuit, they said. reported Houston Public Media.