The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania has "expressly denied" that its doctors misrepresented the identity of a lung donor to Tony Grier, the man who died after receiving a pair of cancerous lungs during a transplant at HUP two years ago.
"The only basis [the] plaintiff has for this 'claim' is the hearsay testimony of the decedent's mother," HUP's lawyers wrote on Thursday in a response to a significant amendment that lawyers for Tony Grier's mother, Emma Grier, filed in December.
In the original complaint, Emma Grier alleges that her son was told by HUP physician Robert Kotloff that he would be receiving the lungs of a "healthy 18-year-old male" to replace his own diseased lungs.
But Tony Grier instead received cancer-riddled lungs from a 31-year-old female smoker, the complaint says.
HUP, however, has responded that the "defendants' only 'transgressions' were to preserve Mr. Grier's life until such time as lungs were available to him, transplant him and render heroic follow-up care."
HUP's response continued to say that the hospital did not fabricate the healthy 18-year-old donor that Emma Grier describes.
The response marks the first time HUP's attorneys have directly addressed this issue of misrepresentation.
Emma Grier's amended complaint - filed at the end of December - added Lancaster Hospital and the donor program that provided the lung to HUP to the list of defendants. It also added new charges, including "lack of informed consent," "intentional and/or negligent misrepresentation" and "punitive damages" to the complaint.
In Thursday's response to that amendment, HUP's attorneys further assert that - even if Emma Grier is correct that HUP doctors consciously lied about the identity - Kotloff was not the physician who performed the surgery and thus cannot be the subject of a "lack of informed consent" claim.
Furthermore, HUP's lawyers say, "For informed consent, doctors are not required to disclose 'all known information' to a patient" - just a general description of the procedure and the risks associated with it.
HUP attorneys also claim that the entire amendment is illegitimate because it adds charges against HUP doctors "only on the basis of supposedly newly discovered information about the donor hospital" - Lancaster, not HUP.
However, in their defense of the amendment, Grier's attorneys wrote on Friday that the amendment was filed after they received some of Tony Grier's HUP medical records, which "revealed the need for the . new claims," but did not elaborate.
In that document, Emma Grier's attorneys repeated their bottom-line condemnation of HUP's conduct throughout the lung transplant and trial.
"The defendants' conduct is the very reason why punitive damages awards were created. The defendants caused Mr. Grier's death and appear to be proud of their work."
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