A Missouri appellate court revived a wrongful death suit against a group of cardiologists, finding the plaintiff’s expert testimony was erroneously struck based on rendering his opinion based on the physicians’ use, or lack thereof, of medical record software.
On Monday, the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Eastern District reversed and remanded a summary judgment ruling in favor of two doctors and St. Louis Cardiology Consultants after a patient went into cardiac arrest after waiting hours in the emergency room to see a doctor. During his deposition, Dr. Huilin Li, the attending physician on the evening shift, testified that the prior shift’s staff did not notify him about the patient’s condition, let alone that Li was the assigned physician. The plaintiff’s expert witness opined that the standard of care imposed a duty on the doctors to review which patients were assigned to them, and that physicians were required to see their patients within an hour of their shift starting.