More letters sent in Md.

St. Joseph Medical Center has sent letters to an additional 169 former patients notifying them that they might have undergone unnecessary stenting, according to a written statement issued by the Towson, Md., hospital.

This batch of letters brings the total notifications to 538. Letters were first issued last December after an internal review uncovered patients treated by the 332-bed hospital's former cardiac catheterization laboratory director, Mark Midei, were not appropriate candidates.

The hospital began notifying patients last December around the same time that a Baltimore County civil jury found that Midei had committed fraud by steering hospital patients to surgeons employed by his practice. St. Joseph, which was named in the civil case, was cleared of wrongdoing.

Hospital officials reached an agreement in July 2009 to settle an investigation that federal prosecutors had launched into the physician referral case. St. Joseph terminated its relationship with Midei last summer.

In a related matter, Thomson Reuters removed St. Joseph from its list of the 100 top heart hospitals for 2009 because the potentially unnecessary stent procedures were performed during the data-collection period to assemble the 2009 list. Thomson Reuters replaced St. Joseph on the list with 407-bed Baptist Hospital East, Louisville, Ky.

The original list of the 100 Top Hospitals: Cardiovascular Benchmarks, 2009, appeared in the Nov. 16, 2009 issue of Modern Healthcare. The revised list is available on Modern Healthcare.com under Surveys, Lists and Data.

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