Lawsuit leads clinic to drop patient, family

In the Courts. By Bonnie Booth, AMNews contributor. Dec. 10, 2007.

When a jury in Sedgwick County, Kan., held a physician at a Wichita clinic liable for medical malpractice last fall and awarded the plaintiff more than $140,000 in damages, the Wichita Eagle covered the story.

But the article's focus wasn't the malpractice award. Instead, the newspaper focused on the letter the Wichita Clinic mailed the plaintiff, Wichita police officer Karie Zimmer, shortly after she filed the lawsuit in 2005.

The letter served as notice that, because of the lawsuit, the clinic was severing the relationship between the more than 100 physicians in the practice and Zimmer and her immediate family.

Indeed, the clinic's chief medical officer, Robert Kenegy, MD, told the Wichita Eagle that other patients also find their relationships with the clinic severed after suing one of its doctors.

Dr. Kenegy did not return phone calls from AMNews seeking comment.

Legal experts agreed that it is not common practice for entire groups of doctors to refuse to treat plaintiffs' families following a lawsuit filing. But while it may not seem "fair" to patients, there is nothing in the law that forbids it.

"Given the law as I know it to be, a physician can treat whoever they want and stop treating whoever they want, as long as proper steps are taken for continuity of care," said Miles Zaremski, a health care attorney and partner of Zaremski Law Group in suburban Chicago.

Zaremski acknowledged that emotions often run high in situations involving legal action, but he said the Wichita Clinic's actions, while leaving a bad taste in the mouth of some patients and physicians alike, are analogous to several other situations in which a physician may terminate a relationship with a patient under less volatile conditions.