$14.49 Million After a Teleradiologist Read a Cervical Spine CT as Normal and Missed a Spinal Abscess
After trial: Wisconsin caps noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases at $750,000. No reporting was found confirming how that cap was applied to the final judgment, so this is the jury's gross award rather than a confirmed recovery.
Won by Habush Habush & Rottier S.C..
A Kenosha County jury awarded Joseph Barsuli $14.49 million after a radiologist employed by Virtual Radiologic Corporation read his cervical spine CT as normal. A second radiologist found a cervical epidural abscess on the same film the next day, and by then the damage to Barsuli's spinal cord could not be undone.
What happened
Joseph Barsuli was 49 when he started feeling unwell. He had body aches and pain on the left side of his neck. The doctor who saw him diagnosed a virus.
The symptoms did not resolve. Numbness set in, first in a finger, then spreading through his arm. Numbness following neck pain is not a viral symptom, it is a neurological one, and Barsuli was admitted to the hospital. A neurologist ordered a CT scan of his cervical spine.
That scan was not read by a radiologist in the building. It went to Dr. Wayne Liou, a radiologist employed by Virtual Radiologic Corporation, a teleradiology company that reads imaging remotely for hospitals that do not staff a radiologist around the clock. Liou read the study as normal.
The following day a local radiologist looked at the same film and saw a cervical epidural abscess: a pocket of infection in the space around the spinal cord in the neck. An epidural abscess compresses the cord as it grows, and the injury it causes becomes permanent once the compression has gone on long enough. It is treatable, and the treatment is urgent, which is precisely why it is the kind of finding a cervical CT is ordered to catch.
Barsuli went to surgery. The operation did not restore what had been lost. He was left with a loss of feeling in both his upper and lower extremities.
He sued Dr. Liou and Virtual Radiologic Corporation in Kenosha County Circuit Court, alleging that the failure to identify the abscess on the initial read cost him the window in which the injury was still reversible. The case put a question in front of the jury that hospital systems across the country have been quietly navigating for two decades: what standard of care applies when the radiologist reading an emergency study is a contractor several states away, looking at images on a screen with no access to the patient.
The trial team was Daniel Rottier, Eric Ryberg, Elissa Bowlin, and Steve Botzau of Habush Habush and Rottier. On August 16, 2019, the jury returned a verdict of $14.49 million.
The award was large enough to draw national notice, ranked among the 75 largest verdicts in the country that year and among the 20 largest medical malpractice verdicts of 2019. Wisconsin caps noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases at $750,000, and no public reporting was found confirming how the cap was applied to the final judgment here, so the $14.49 million figure should be read as the jury's award rather than a confirmed recovery.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Habush Habush & Rottier S.C.
All Habush Habush & Rottier S.C. proven verdicts →Robert Habush won a $99.25 million Milwaukee County jury verdict for the widows of three ironworkers killed when the Big Blue crane collapsed at Miller Park, though the $94 million punitive portion was later vacated and the case settled for about $30 million.
A Racine County jury found Hyundai's driver-seat and head-restraint design defective and awarded Edward and Susan Vanderventer $38.1 million, the largest single-plaintiff compensatory verdict in Wisconsin history, later upheld on appeal.
A Milwaukee County jury awarded $25.3 million after emergency room providers failed to tell Ascaris Mayo that her symptoms could mean a Strep A infection, an omission that cost her all four limbs, though the Wisconsin Supreme Court later reinstated the state's $750,000 cap on noneconomic damages.
A Fitchburg family recovered $22.5 million after their six-week-old son suffered permanent brain damage during surgery at UW Health's American Family Children's Hospital. The suit alleged an anesthesia resident failed to respond to prolonged low blood pressure readings. It is the second largest payment ever made by Wisconsin's Injured Patients and Families Compensation Fund.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
A Kansas City jury awarded ovarian cancer patient Georgia Hayes $225 million in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages against pharmacist Robert Courtney, who had diluted chemotherapy drugs for profit. The trial judge later reduced the award to roughly $330 million, and Hayes collected almost nothing from Courtney himself, whose assets had been seized by the federal government. Courtney was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison, and drug makers Eli Lilly and Bristol-Myers Squibb later paid $71 million to settle victims' claims.