Two more stent suits were filed against Westmoreland Hospital and Drs. Morcos and Bousramos in Westmoreland County this week according to the Pittsburgh Tribune Review.
On March 3, 2011, Excela Health, owner of Westmoreland Hospital, sent letters to 141 seperate patients advising them that they may have been recipients of unnecessary heart stents placed by Drs. Morcos and Bousramos in 2010. Morcos and Bousramos are interventional cardiologists who, until January this year, had staff privileges at Westmoreland Hospital. The number of complaints now filed totals 21.
Officials at Excela have indicated that they have retained an outside consulting group to review cardiology cases and expect results of their 2009 cases to be issue in May. This information comes on the heels of announcements last year in Maryland, Texas and Louisiana of unnecessary stent procedures performed by various doctors at hospitals in those states.
According to the the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, Drs. Morcos and Bousramos performed more than 750 of the 2,000 heart stent procedures done at Westmoreland Hospital in 2010. According to the December 2010 investigatory report of the United States Senate Committee on Finance, nationwide, balloon-expandable stents were being implanted in more than 90% of all interventional coronary procedures. Assuming the accuracy of these figures, it would appear that a patient receiving interventional coronary care by Drs.Morcos and Bousramos at Westmoreland Hospital in 2010 had a better than 15% chance of receiving an unnecessary heart procedure. One has to wonder how these doctors decided upon whom to prey.
One problem may be the lack of peer review. Doctors at other hospitals have indicated that at some facilities the cardiologist who performs the diagnostic test to ascertain the extent of the blockage is the same doctor who interprets the test and ultimately inserts the stents. One can easily see how this might lead to a "fox in the hen house" type scenario. It is not yet known whether this lack of oversight existed at Westmoreland Hospital.
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