In 2018, Daryl Young was hoping for a new lease of life when he received a heart transplant at a New Jersey hospital after years of congestive heart failure. But he suffered brain damage during the procedure and never woke up.
The following year, a ProPublica investigation revealed that Young’s case was part of the case a heart transplant scheme gone wrong at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center in 2018. A wave of poor outcomes has caused the center’s percentage of patients alive a year after surgery — a key metric — to fall below the national average. Medical staff were under pressure to increase this rate. ProPublica released audio recordings of meetings in which staff members discussed the need to keep Young alive for a year because they feared another drop in the program’s survival rate would draw the scrutiny of regulators. On the tapes, the director of the transplant program, Dr. Mark Zucker, warned his team against offering Young’s family the option of transitioning from aggressive care to comfortable care, in which no life-saving efforts would be made. He recognized these actions as “very unethical”.
ProPublica’s revelations horrified Young’s sister, Andrea Young, who said she was never given the full picture of her brother’s condition, nor the findings a subsequent investigation by a federal regulator which determined that the hospital was putting patients in “imminent danger.” Last month, she filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against the hospital and members of her brother’s medical team.
Lawsuit claims Newark Beth Israel staff were “negligent and deviated from generally accepted standards of practice” that led to Young’s tragic health outcome.
The defendants in the lawsuit have not yet filed their responses to the complaint in the court documents. But spokeswoman Linda Comate said in an email that “Newark Beth Israel Medical Center is one of the leading heart transplant programs in the country, and we are committed to serving our patients with the highest quality. As this case is under active litigation, we are unable to provide further details.” Zucker, who no longer works at Newark Beth Israel, did not respond to requests for comment. His attorney also did not return calls and emails seeking comment.
Zucker also did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment in 2018; Newark Beth Israel said at the time in a statement issued on behalf of Zucker and other staff that “revealing parts of lengthy and highly complex medical discussions, if taken out of context, could distort the intent of the conversations.”
The lawsuit alleges that Young suffered brain damage as a result of severely low blood pressure during the transplant surgery. In 2019, when the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services scrutinized the heart transplant program following a ProPublica investigation, regulators found that the hospital failed to take corrective action even after patients were harmed, leading to further harm. For example, one patient’s kidneys failed after a transplant procedure in August 2018, and medical staff recommended internally that the frequency of blood pressure measurements be increased during the procedure, the lawsuit says. The lawsuit alleges that the hospital failed to follow its own guidelines and that a month later, “these failures were repeated” during Young’s surgery, which resulted in brain damage.
The lawsuit also alleges that Young was not asked if he had an advance directive, such as a preference not to be resuscitated, despite hospital policy stating that patients should be asked at the time of admission. The lawsuit also noted that a CMS investigation found that Andrea Young was not informed of her brother’s condition.
Andrea Young said she understands mistakes can happen during medical procedures, “but it’s their duty and responsibility to be honest and let the family know exactly what went wrong.” Young said she had to fight to find out what was happening to her brother, at one point she went to the library and tried to study medical books to ask the right questions. “I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday how desperately I was looking for answers,” she said.
Andrea Young said she was motivated to file the lawsuit because she wants accountability. “Especially with the fact that the doctors were never held accountable or told the truth about the circumstances of my brother’s condition from the beginning, this is not only wrong and unethical, but it has cost our entire family a lot,” she said. “For me, the most important thing is that those responsible are held accountable.”
ProPublica’s finding that “an institution puts its existence before the existence of a patient is a scary concept,” said attorney Jonathan Lomura, who is representing Andrea Young in the case along with attorney Christian LoPiano. In addition to seeking damages for Daryl Young’s children, “we want to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Lomura said.
The lawsuit further alleges that Newark Beth Israel medical staff invaded Young’s privacy and violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, better known as HIPAA, by sharing details of his case with the media without his permission. “We want people to be whistleblowers and want to get information,” but that information needs to be communicated directly to patients and their family members, Lomura said.
credit:
Demetrius Freeman for ProPublica
This is according to a 2019 CMS investigation Newark Beth Israel program put patients in ‘imminent danger’ the most serious level of violation, and required the hospital to implement corrective plans. Newark Beth Israel disagreed with all of the regulator’s findings and said in a statement at the time that the CMS team lacked the “evidence, knowledge and experience” to evaluate and diagnose patient outcomes.
The hospital implemented corrective plans and continues to operate the heart transplant program today. The latest federal databased on procedures from January 2021 to June 2023, shows that a patient’s annual survival rate at Newark Beth is lower than the national average. It also shows that the number of graft failures, including deaths, during this time period was higher than the expected number of deaths for the program.
Andrea Young said she struggled with feelings of emptiness in the years following her brother’s surgery. They were close and called each other every day. “There is nothing in the world that can bring my brother back, so the only consolation I will have is to bring those responsible to justice,” she said. Daryl Young died on September 12, 2022, never waking up from transplant surgery.
A separate medical malpractice lawsuit filed in 2020 by the wife of another Newark heart transplant patient, Beth Israel who died after receiving an organ infected with a parasitic disease continues. The hospital denied the allegations in court. The New Jersey employer of the pathologists named in the case settled for $1.7 million this month, according to the plaintiff’s attorney, Christian LoPiano. The rest of the case continues.
