$49 Million Verdict for Cervical Cancer Missed After Years of High-Risk HPV Results Without Colposcopy
After trial: Westmed, a subsidiary of Summit Health and VillageMD, has said it intends to appeal. The appeal is unresolved, so the $49 million is the jury's verdict rather than a collected judgment.
Won by Silver Golub & Teitell LLP.
Jennifer Anderson tested positive for high-risk HPV at annual visits with her gynecologist over several years, and no colposcopy was ever performed. By the time her cervical cancer was found in 2019 it had spread to her chest, abdomen, and pelvis. A Stamford jury awarded her $39 million and her husband $10 million.
What happened
A Pap test that comes back positive for a high-risk strain of human papillomavirus is not a diagnosis. It is an instruction. HPV is the cause of virtually all cervical cancer, and the strains classified as high risk are the ones that turn into it. The standard of care when those results come back is a colposcopy: a magnified examination of the cervix that finds precancerous change while it is still local and still curable. Cervical cancer is one of the most preventable cancers there is, and that follow-up is why.
Jennifer Anderson, of Darien, Connecticut, was a patient of Dr. Dzwinka Carroll, an obstetrician and gynecologist employed by Westmed Medical Group, from at least 2013 through 2019. Over that period, at multiple annual visits, her Pap tests repeatedly came back positive for high-risk HPV.
The case her lawyers brought was that no colposcopy was ever performed. Not once, across years of results that called for one.
In 2019, after Anderson reported irregular menstrual cycles and bleeding, she was diagnosed with invasive squamous cell carcinoma of the cervix. It was no longer local. The cancer had spread to her chest, her abdomen, and her pelvis. She has late-stage metastatic cervical cancer, and the expectation presented in the case is that it will kill her.
Peter Dreyer and Sarah Russell of Silver Golub and Teitell tried the case in Stamford Superior Court before Judge Yamini Menon. It ran five weeks. The medicine at the center of it was not esoteric or contested at the frontier of the field: the question was whether a gynecologist who repeatedly receives high-risk HPV results is required to order the follow-up procedure that the screening protocol exists to trigger.
The jury deliberated for about three hours. It found the defendants negligent and awarded $39 million to Anderson and $10 million to her husband, for a total of $49 million.
Westmed, a subsidiary of Summit Health and VillageMD, said it intends to appeal.
What gives the case its shape is that the harm was entirely a function of timing. The screening worked. The abnormal results were generated, repeatedly, and were sitting in the chart. What the case turned on was the step after the screening, and the years that passed while it did not happen.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.WTNH (New Haven): independent television news reporting on the verdict, the HPV screening history, and the metastatic diagnosis·Archived copy
- 2.Darien Patch: independent local reporting naming Dr. Dzwinka Carroll and Westmed and giving the $39M / $10M split·Archived copy
- 3.News 12: independent reporting on the failure to follow high-risk HPV monitoring protocols·Archived copy
- 4.Expert Institute: independent case analysis of the screening and colposcopy standard of care at issue·Archived copy
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