Hospital to pay for doctor's wrongdoing

The doctor wore an unusual pen around his neck. It was really a concealed camera, and for years he secretly recorded women at some of their most private moments, during pelvic exams. On Monday, Johns Hopkins Hospital agreed to pay $190 million to more than 7,000 women for the gross violation of doctor-patient trust in what experts said was one of the largest medical malpractice cases of its kind.

Dr Nikita A. Levy, a gynecologist and obstetrician for Johns Hopkins Community Medicine in Baltimore, was fired in February 2013 after a female colleague reported her suspicions of his penlike device. Ten days later, he committed suicide.

Investigations by the police and the FBI ended without criminal charges being filed, concluding that Dr Levy had not shared the more than 1,000 videos and images he had stored on computers at his home. But a class-action lawsuit against the hospital accused Dr Levy of “harmful and offensive sexual” contact with patients. Jonathan Schochor, a lawyer for the patients, said women were devastated to learn of the filming.

“They feel an extreme breach of faith, breach of trust and betrayal,” he said. Many former patients “have dropped out of the medical system,” he said, adding that they now refuse to see doctors or take their children to pediatricians out of mistrust.

Settlement for closure

The civil suit charged the hospital with invasion of privacy, emotional distress and negligence in its oversight of Dr Levy, who practiced in a community clinic in East Baltimore run by the giant hospital system. In a statement on Monday, the hospital said it hoped that the settlement, along with law enforcement findings that the images were not shared, “helps those affected achieve a measure of closure.”

The statement from the hospital, added: “We assure you that one individual does not define Johns Hopkins. Johns Hopkins is defined by the tens of thousands of employees who come to work determined to provide world-class care for our patients and their families.”

Initially, the hospital identified nearly 12,700 patients Dr Levy might have seen in his 25 years as an employee. Investigators estimated that he began recording patients with tiny cameras hidden in a pen or a key fob around 2005. “Words cannot describe how deeply sorry we are for all this has affected,” two top officials of Johns Hopkins wrote to former patients last year. “We are terribly sorry this has happened and for the distress you must be feeling.”

After Dr Levy’s colleague reported him, hospital security officers confronted him in his office, and he turned over several cameras. A hospital statement at the time said that he was told to seek counseling and was escorted off the premises. Johns Hopkins contacted the Baltimore police and fired the doctor on Feb. 8, 2013.

Although law enforcement agencies concluded that Dr Levy had not uploaded any of the images online or shared them with others, Schochor is not so sure. He cited retired FBI experts whom he hired as consultants for the lawsuit. “I think there’s overwhelming probability” that Dr Levy shared images, Schochor said.

His law firm, Schochor, Federico & Staton, which specializes in medical malpractice, interviewed about 2,000 former patients. He said many of the women described disturbances in work and their personal lives after learning of the recordings. “There’s been a huge, devastating result to this whole thing,” Schochor said. “Many have had changes in their ability to focus, problems with sleeplessness. Some have had changes in their relationships with spouses and significant others.”

James A Wells, the chairman of a medicine and law committee for the American Bar Association, said $190 million was “a very large number for the settlement of medical malpractice claims involving a single physician.”

Other cases involving doctors who secretly recorded patients have also drawn big payouts, though somewhat less than the Hopkins settlement. The case of an endocrinologist in Connecticut who took nude pictures and abused a series of children, for instance, was settled for $50 million in 2012.

If the Hopkins settlement receives final approval by the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, each plaintiff will be reviewed individually to determine their share of the damages, including being interviewed and having their medical records examined. As for the lawyer’s share, Schochor said that was up to the court to decide.