Maryland Lawsuits AgainstCharles Emergency Physicians P A

According to Maryland Judiciary Case Search, Charles Emergency Physicians, entered with that exact spelling, has been sued 10 times for medical malpractice and 2 times for tort claims since 2012. The exact search criteria used on Maryland Judiciary Case Search is as follows:  Company: Charles Emergency Physicians, Party Type: Defendant, Case Type: Civil  (Medical Malpractice & Other Tort), Court System: Circuit Court only, County: Default All, Filing Date: 9/26/2012-08/17/2022.

About Charles Emergency Physicians

Charles Emergency Physicians, P.A. is a group practice of board certified doctors, nurses, and physician assistants. The medical staff specializes in emergency and critical care, and several group members have additional certifications in pediatric and internal medicine. Designated as a third party acute care provider, Charles Emergency Physicians is exclusively contracted with the emergency department of Greater Baltimore Medical Center (GBMC).

Charles Emergency Physicians in the News

The practice of third party contractors providing emergency room treatment has become standard operating procedure in hospitals nationwide. This is largely because the outsourcing of critical care offers financial benefits to medical facilities. Emergency departments are labor intensive – there is a constant stream of patients to monitor, an unpredictable variety of conditions to assess and treat, and a large volume of billing to process. But hospitals rarely generate significant revenue from their cost heavy emergency wards. Many visitors seeking emergency care are uninsured or underinsured, making it less likely they will be able to pay in full for their treatment. Instead, hospitals produce most of their income from expensive elective procedures such as surgeries that often must be pre-approved for coverage by insurers, thereby ensuring payment. By contracting with a third party critical care company that hires and manages doctors, maintains billing, and pursues collection payments from delinquent patients, hospitals can offload the expense and labor that comes with running an emergency room to focus its efforts on more profitable practice areas.

Until recently, patients often bore the brunt of these cost cutting measures. In many states, emergency room doctors were permitted to bill exorbitant out of network rates for critical care visits, even if the hospital where they provided treatment was considered in-network with a patient’s insurance. This legal loophole exploited a third-party physician’s status as an independent contractor who is not technically employed by the hospital. Meanwhile, patients were left to pay bills that in some cases totaled thousands of dollars for a simple ten-minute exam.

Fortunately, a federal law enacted in 2022 aims to prohibit this type of predatory billing. Known as the No Surprises Act, the law mandates that providers bill patients their in-network insurance rate for nearly all third-party medical services.  However, plaintiffs who file claims of medical malpractice in Maryland courts against hospital emergency rooms still face challenges. Most states hold hospitals directly liable for the actions of their acute care physicians regardless of whether they are employees or contractors. But Maryland’s court system has historically required that a patient prove they were unaware of their emergency room doctor’s third-party designation at the time of treatment before a hospital can be found responsible for medical errors or negligence.

A recent ruling by Maryland’s Court of Appeals may have set a new precedent for determining liability in third-party hospital agent malpractice cases. In August 2022, the court reinstated a high-dollar malpractice verdict against a contracted emergency room surgeon at Prince George’s Hospital Center. The verdict, which was initially handed down in 2019 by a Prince George’s County Circuit Court jury, awarded over $6 million to a patient at the hospital who allegedly did not receive timely treatment for a leg injury. While the hospital argued immunity from culpability on the grounds that the treating physician was a third-party contractor and thus not an “agent” of the facility, the jury rejected this defense. The hospital then petitioned to the Court of Special Appeals, which overturned the verdict on the basis that the plaintiff “failed to show he believed” the doctor was an agent of the hospital. However, the Court of Appeals rejected that decision and reinstated the verdict, noting in its written decision that “the patient…relies on the facility’s representation that its personnel will provide the required treatment as that person has no time to either choose among individual physicians or make fine distinctions on their precise contractual relationship with the facility.”

While the recent Court of Appeals decision is encouraging for injured plaintiffs who want to pursue litigation against a third-party hospital physician, they will still need a good personal injury attorney on their side to fight for the maximum amount of available compensation.

Some of the major personal injury attorneys that regularly sue Charles Emergency Physicians for medical malpractice are Schochor and Staton, P.A., and Dugan Babij, Tolley & Kohler LLC. As Charles Emergency Physicians practices exclusively at Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Baltimore County, claims against it are filed in Baltimore County Circuit Court. If you or a loved one have been injured by Charles Emergency Physicians, you should contact a personal injury lawyer to assess your claim.

Last updated August 17, 2022