DALLAS– Several relatives of patients who died while waiting for a new liver said Wednesday they want to know whether their loved ones were unfairly denied a transplant by a Houston doctor accused of manipulating the waiting list to make some patients ineligible to receive one. new body.
Officials at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center said they are investigating after discovering that a doctor made “inappropriate changes” to the national database of people awaiting liver transplants. Earlier this month, the hospital halted its liver and kidney programs.
Susie Garcia’s son, Richard Mostacci, died in February 2023 after being told he was too sick for a transplant. He was 43 years old. “We saw him escaping, escaping and there was nothing we could do, and we trusted, we trusted the doctors,” Garcia said at a news conference.
She is among family members of three patients who have hired attorneys at a Houston law firm that filed for a temporary restraining order Tuesday to stop Dr. Steve Bynon from deleting or destroying evidence. Lawyer Tommy Hastings said some interactions with Bynon raised “concerns about perhaps some personal animosities and that perhaps he took it out on patients.”
“Again, we are at the beginning of this investigation,” Hastings said.
The Hermann-Memorial statement did not name the doctor, but the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, or UTHealth Houston, issued a statement defending Bynon, calling him “an exceptionally talented and caring physician” with rates of survival rates that are “among the best in the country.”
Bynon is a UTHealth Houston employee hired by Memorial Hermann. He did not respond to an email question Wednesday.
The hospital said the inappropriate changes were made only to the liver transplant program, but because it shared leadership of the liver and kidney transplant programs, both were shut down.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services also said it is conducting an investigation, adding that it is “working across the department to resolve this matter.”
Neither Hermann Memorial nor UTHealth or HHS had additional comment Wednesday.
Meanwhile, a woman who used a different law firm filed a lawsuit last week in Harris County against Memorial Hermann and UTHealth, alleging negligence in the death of her husband, John Montgomery, who died in May 2023 at age 66 while was on the waiting list for a liver transplant. . The suit says Montgomery was told he wasn’t sick enough and was later told he was too sick before being taken off the list.
The death rate of people awaiting a liver transplant at Memorial Hermann has been higher than expected in recent years, according to publicly available data from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, which evaluates U.S. organ transplant programs. The group found that in the two-year period from July 2021 to June 2023, there were 19 waitlist deaths, while the models would have predicted around 14 deaths.
While the hospital’s waitlist mortality rate of 28% was higher than expected, “there were many liver programs with more extreme outcomes during the same period,” Jon Snyder, director of the registry, said in an email.
He said the hospital’s first-year success rates for the 56 adults who received transplants between July 2020 and December 2022 were 35% better than expected based on national results.
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