A New York doctor has given sworn testimony that he witnessed his former colleague injure and kill patients by performing unnecessary medical procedures as director of Raleigh General Hospital's cardiac unit.
In an April deposition, Dr. Marcus Sodums testified about working for three years with Dr. Donald Kenneth Glaser, the former director of Raleigh General's cardiac unit.
Nearly 90 lawsuits have been filed in Raleigh County Circuit Court claiming Glaser, along with Raleigh General and the company that owns it, LifePoint Hospitals, organized a scheme to generate revenue that involved patients undergoing unnecessary procedures, including, among others, cardiac catheterizations and angioplasties.
In June, Raleigh Circuit Judge H. L. Kirkpatrick referred the cases to the state's mass litigation panel.
"Dr. Sodums testified that numerous patients were injured and even killed as a result of the unnecessary procedures performed by Dr. Glaser at RGH," wrote Charleston lawyer Ben Salango, who represents former patients of Glaser, in a motion filed in April asking a judge to order the hospital to turn over a letter written five years ago by Sodums.
Kirkpatrick, in turn, ordered lawyers for the hospital last month to produce the letter, which Sodums wrote in March 2012 to Raleigh General's CEO Alan Peters.
Lawyers for the hospital have filed notice that they will appeal the judge's ruling to the West Virginia Supreme Court.
Kirkpatrick disagreed with arguments made by hospital lawyers that the letter is protected by peer review privileges. The judge pointed out that Sodums confirmed in his deposition that he never took part in a peer review while at the hospital in Beckley, and that no one had instructed him to write the letter.
Sodums raised concerns in his letter over unnecessary procedures being conducted by Glaser and patients' safety, according to court documents filed by plaintiffs, which include a transcript of Sodums' deposition. The deposition was taken in Ithica, New York, where Sodums, a cardiologist, now works. He left the Beckley hospital when his contract ended in 2015.
Sodums and Glaser routinely covered patients for one another as they were the only two interventional cardiologists at the hospital from February 2010 until May 2013, when Glaser left the hospital, Salango wrote.
Glaser later worked in Utah and Maryland. Before that, he accepted a job with the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Raleigh County in October 2014 - after Raleigh General failed to disclose he was under investigation.
He withdrew his application in January 2015, days after media outlets reported about the investigation.
LifePoint continues to comply with an investigation by federal prosecutors from West Virginia's Southern District, according to filings made by the company.
In September 2013, officials from two LifePoint hospitals, Raleigh General and Vaughan Regional Medical Center, in Selma, Alabama, voluntarily contacted the U. S. Department of Justice and disclosed allegations being brought against two of its cardiologists - Glaser and another from the Alabama hospital.
LifePoint is also a defendant in multiple lawsuits filed in Alabama. Those complaints allege Dr. Seydi V. Aksut performed improper procedures on patients.
LifePoint said in a June 30 filing with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission, that for the past six months, the company recorded an accrual for loss contingencies for cardiology-related lawsuits of about $25 million.
Raleigh General recruited Glaser from Boca Raton, Florida, to serve as director of the hospital's push to offer advanced cardiac care and compete against Charleston Area Medical Center.
Under Glaser's watch, the number of cardiac catheterization procedures increased from 350 a year to 2,100 a year from 2009 to 2012, according to filings by the plaintiffs. Nurses complained that Glaser was sleeping in patient rooms and operating on patients 18 to 21 hours a day.
The lawsuits allege that hospital officials knew about Glaser's misconduct for about five years before informing patients they could have had an unnecessary procedure by Glaser.
Plaintiffs also claim hospital officials should have been suspicious of Glaser as early as 2010. That's when nursing staff in the cardiac unit began complaining to hospital administrators about the volume and medical necessity of the procedures Glaser was performing, according to the lawsuits.
Sodums testified in April that he became concerned about Glaser in 2010 after first noticing his colleague was mischaracterizing, among other things, the severity of chest pain experienced by patients.
Sodums also said, according to a transcript of his deposition, that it was his opinion that Glaser was falsifying medical charts to perform cardiac catheterizations that were not needed.
"And it was your opinion that he was committing fraud?" Salango asked the doctor about Glaser, according to the transcript.
"Yes," Sodums answered.
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