News in brief - Jan. 20, 2003

Panel will decide which court hears CIGNA settlement - Haiku winners ponder work hours - Ophthalmologists to fight subpoena - New Hampshire physician to get trial

Panel will decide which court hears CIGNA settlement

A panel of federal judges will have the final say on which federal court -- one in Miami or one in Illinois -- will decide the future of a settlement in a class-action lawsuit that two physicians filed against CIGNA alleging harmful reimbursement practices.

The Multidistrict Litigation Panel is scheduled to meet Jan. 28 in Los Angeles and make its ruling within a couple of months.

In late 2002, CIGNA and two physicians who sued the company in an Illinois state court moved the class-action suit to a federal court in Illinois and then filed a settlement agreement. But federal lawsuits that physicians and medical societies from around the country filed against the largest managed care companies, including CIGNA, already had been consolidated in the Miami courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge Federico Moreno.

A few weeks after the proposed settlement was filed in the Illinois federal court, Moreno ruled that the CIGNA settlement couldn't go forward until the courts determined which judge should hold the final fairness hearing.

Also in late December 2002, Moreno ruled that Oxford Health Plans -- which primarily insures people in the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut areas -- could not be added as a defendant in the massive class-action litigation in Miami.

Haiku winners ponder work hours

Resident work hours was a popular theme of entries in the first haiku contest held by AMA's Dept. of Graduate Medical Education.

Jeffrey A. Blalack, MD, won first prize with:

It's only Thursday.
Eighty hours have come and gone.
I have to go now.

Jeffrey Meffert, MD, landed second place with:

Competent. Yes? No?
The PD explores the core
Eighty hours to teach.

And third prize went to Milton C. Olsen, PhD, who wrote:

We were trained that way
We persist in our folly
Pain becomes dogma.

Ophthalmologists to fight subpoena

An insurance company and two physician organizations have teamed up to try to keep about 600 ophthalmologists from being forced to answer a court subpoena that they say is burdensome to their staff time as well as their pocketbooks.

The American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, the American Academy of Ophthalmology and the Ophthalmic Mutual Insurance Co. want to stop a subpoena that asks physicians to go back through several years of records to figure out how many procedures they performed using equipment that is under fire in a patent infringement lawsuit. Nidek Co. Ltd filed a lawsuit accusing rival ophthalmic laser manufacturer VISX Inc. of patent infringement.

"It is unconscionable that businesses would involve their current and future customers in these types of corporate disputes," said H. Dunbar Hoskins Jr., MD, American Academy of Ophthalmology executive vice president. "It adds unnecessary burdens to already overworked physicians and creates antagonism toward the companies. Nothing good can come from it."

The groups hired a lawyer who is trying to work with the company to make the subpoena less burdensome. If that fails, they plan to ask the court to step in.

New Hampshire physician to get trial

Physicians in New Hampshire got a mixed ruling from the state Supreme Court late last year. The high court ruled that medical staffs don't have the legal standing to sue a hospital or its trustees. But, the court said, a physician can go forward with his case that asks the court for relief from a "gag order" the hospital placed on him.

The New Hampshire Supreme Court ruling stems from a case that the Exeter Hospital Medical Staff and medical staff president Mark Windt, MD, filed against the hospital's board of trustees after Dr. Windt had a falling out with the board. The board voted to remove Dr. Windt as a trustee and told him he could not discuss the details of his disagreement with the hospital.

Although the case the medical staff brought won't be allowed to go forward, a trial court will hear Dr. Windt's case.