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Nurse Accused of Sexually Assaulting Unconscious Patients; Doc's Trip-and-Fall Plot

— A weekly roundup of healthcare's encounters with the courts

MedpageToday
Legal Break over a blindfolded Lady Justice statue holding scales.

Two women who say they were sexually assaulted by an intensive care nurse in Grand Junction, Colorado, alleging it should have known about the nurse's actions. Christopher Lambros, RN, was previously arrested and charged criminally with sexual assault. Prosecutors said Lambros would record himself sexually abusing female patients while they were unconscious. (AP)

New York orthopedic surgeon Andrew Dowd, MD, was convicted for his role in a trip-and-fall fraud scheme. Dowd and lawyer George Constantine allegedly recruited poor and vulnerable people to stage trip-and-fall accidents -- typically at sites such as cellar doors, cracks in sidewalks, and potholes in front of commercial establishments -- and then undergo medically unnecessary surgeries that were designed to increase the value of personal injury lawsuits. Constantine filed nearly 200 fraudulent lawsuits and earned more than $5 million in settlements, while Dowd earned more than $3.2 million for performing unnecessary knee and shoulder arthroscopies, .

Several former patients of Indiana physician Edward Harlamert, MD, are suing him for what they allege are that resulted in severe and permanent physical injuries. (WTHR)

A jury in Texas awarded a woman and her husband for a hospital's failure to treat an epidural hematoma in a timely manner, which left her paralyzed from the chest down. (WFAA)

Connecticut physician Jasdeep Sidana, MD, will pay $4.2 million to resolve allegations that he submitted false claims for immunotherapy services that weren't medically necessary and weren't directly supervised by a physician, according to the .

Two biotech CEOs have been charged for allegedly defrauding investors in CytoDyn. Nader Pourhassan and Kazem Kazempour allegedly made false and misleading statements about the company's development of leronlimab, an investigational monoclonal antibody for HIV, to investors, .

A Massachusetts court physician-assisted suicide. (AP)

Two Pennsylvania-based cardiac monitoring companies, BioTelemetry and CardioNet, will pay almost $45 million to resolve claims that they charged federal insurance programs for cardiac monitoring services performed overseas and, in many cases, by technicians who weren't qualified to do so. The two CardioNet employees who initially brought the allegations will get about $8.3 million, .

Advanced Bionics will pay more than $12 million to resolve charges that some of its cochlear implant processors didn't meet federal standards, .

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    Kristina Fiore leads MedPage’s enterprise & investigative reporting team. She’s been a medical journalist for more than a decade and her work has been recognized by Barlett & Steele, AHCJ, SABEW, and others. Send story tips to k.fiore@medpagetoday.com.