Baylor, Heart Surgeons Settle Fed Charges Over Surgeries

Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM), and Surgical Associates of Texas PA have jointly agreed to pay $15 million to resolve claims that three heart surgeons falsely billed Medicare for cardiac procedures in which they were only partially present.

The settlement is the culmination of a whistleblower suit that was brought in 2019. It is the largest ever for a complaint involving concurrent surgeries, according to the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Texas. The whistleblower will receive $3,075,000.

"The complete disregard for patient safety exhibited by these three doctors put patients at risk and violated Medicare regulations for their own convenience and greed," Special Agent in Charge Jason E. Meadows of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General said in a statement.

"In this case, doctors gambled with their patients' care, during complicated open-heart surgeries no less, compromising quality of care over quantity and then falsely billed Medicare for reimbursement of services they improperly delegated," said Special Agent in Charge Douglas Williams of the Federal Bureau of Investigation - Houston field office, in the statement.

In a statement shared with Medscape Medical News, BCM general counsel Robert Corrigan Jr., said the school "did not engage in conduct that violates any applicable federal law or regulation," adding that "no patients were harmed."

Federal authorities said that Joseph Coselli, MD, Joseph Lamelas, MD, and David Ott, MD "often ran two operating rooms at once and failed to attend the surgical 'timeout' — a critical moment where the entire team would pause and identify key risks to prevent surgical errors."

The procedures included coronary artery bypass grafts as well as aortic and valve repairs.

According to the whistleblower's allegations, the surgeons often entered a second or third operation without designating a backup surgeon. They also allegedly falsely attested on medical records that they were physically present for the "entire" operation, and medical staff did not inform patients that the surgeon would be leaving the room to perform another operation.

That violates Medicare's teaching physician and informed consent regulations, US Attorney Alamdar S. Hamdani said in the statement.

Baylor, Surgeons Maintain No Wrongdoing

In addition to working at St. Luke's, Ott, 77, was also chief surgeon for the Texas Heart Institute, Houston, and is now retired, according to KHOU11 in Houston. The surgeon told the television station that he had done nothing wrong.

Another of the surgeons — Joseph S. Coselli, MD, 71, is currently professor and executive vice-chair of the Department of Surgery at BCM.

Lamelas, 63, is the chief of the division of cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Miami. A Medscape Medical News request for comment had not been answered by press time.

Baylor counsel Corrigan said that the settlement acknowledged that BCM disputed that any violations of federal law occurred and that the College being a party to the agreement is not an admission of liability. Baylor decided to resolve the dispute "after considering the cost and expense incurred by Baylor to date and anticipated future costs and expenses, including attorneys' fees," Corrigan said.

Similarly, Baylor St. Luke's said in a statement that the settlement "is not an admission of liability." The hospital "remains committed to complying with all CMS regulations," said the statement.

Double-Booking: A Common Practice?

Other hospitals have faced federal investigations for double-booking practices in recent years, but none have paid as much as Baylor to settle the allegations.

In 2023, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and James Luketich, MD, agreed to pay $8.5 million to settle claims similar to those in the Baylor case.

Jonathan D'Cunha, MD, former vice chair of cardiothoracic surgery at UPMC, alleged that Luketich, the longtime chair of UPMC's Cardiothoracic Surgery Department, regularly performed as many as three complex procedures simultaneously, failed to participate in all the "key and critical" portions of his surgeries, and "forced his patients to endure hours of medically unnecessary anesthesia time as he moved between operating rooms." 

In another case in 2022, anesthesiologist Lisa Wollman, MD, alleged that five orthopedic surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) often kept patients under anesthesia longer than medically necessary because the doctors were working in two operating rooms. According to Wollman's attorneys, said she repeatedly witnessed and complained about the practice from 2010 to 2015 to no avail. She ended up leaving MGH and filing the suit.

It was the third time since 2019 that MGH had to settle allegations that it had double-booked. In the Wollman case, the hospital paid $14.6 million.

Alicia Ault is a Saint Petersburg, Florida-based freelance journalist whose work has appeared in publications including JAMA and Smithsonian.com. You can find her on X @aliciaault.