Professional Negligence Law Reporter

Huitt v. Iowa Clinic, P.C., No. LACL139726 (Iowa Dist. Ct. Polk Cnty. Apr. 5, 2019).

Rickie Lee Huitt, 65, consulted a urologist at The Iowa Clinic after receiving his prostate cancer screening results. The urologist ordered a biopsy, which was sent to the clinic’s anatomical laboratory for interpretation.

Pathologist Joy Trueblood, the laboratory’s director, examined Huitt’s slides and reported that she had found cancer in both sides of Huitt’s prostate. Huitt then met with the urologist, who told him that he required a radical prostatectomy to survive his cancer. The surgery left Huitt with erectile dysfunction and incontinence. Another pathologist who examined Huitt’s prostate as part of the procedure reported there was no evidence of cancer in the prostate. The previous slides were then sent to the Mayo Clinic for evaluation, which confirmed a lack of prostate cancer in either the biopsy or prostate specimens.

Huitt and his wife sued The Iowa Clinic and Trueblood, alleging that Trueblood had failed to follow standard procedure during her microscopic review of Huitt’s biopsy specimens. The plaintiffs asserted that Trueblood had failed to perform an initial or final “double check” to ensure that the requisition order number matched the patient name on the slide she was examining and that this led to Huitt receiving another patient’s cancer diagnosis.

The plaintiff also claimed that this mistake resulted from Trueblood’s practice of scanning stacked requisition orders instead of placing one order under the scanner at a time to prevent it from pulling up multiple requisition orders. The plaintiffs did not claim lost income.

The jury awarded $12.25 million.

Plaintiff counsel: AAJ member Nicholas Rowley, Beverly Hills, Calif.; AAJ member Randall Shanks, Council Bluffs, Iowa; AAJ member John Kawai, Ojai, Calif.; and Mark Hedberg, Des Moines.