Fired Doc Sues NYU for Discrimination, Defamation, and Retaliation

Emergency medicine specialist Kristin Carmody, MD, filed a lawsuit against New York University, NYU Langone Hospitals, and a group of her former employers, alleging that her December 2020 termination was an act of retaliation, and that she was defamed and discriminated against in the process of her ousting.

In April 2020, a group of 500 NYU residents petitioned NYU Langone leadership for hazard pay, to compensate for the increased risk of infection that they faced on a daily basis during the first COVID-19 surge in New York City. Carmody, the former vice chair of academic affairs for the emergency medicine department at NYU, said in the lawsuit that her support of this movement and her opposition to the hospital leadership’s alleged hostile responses made her a target for retaliation.

According to the complaint, Carmody ignored her supervisors’ demands to seek out and expose the names of the residents who signed the letter. She claimed that Robert Grossman, MD, the dean and CEO of NYU Langone Health, told her that he was not only keeping track of this group, but he was also compiling a list of their names to place them on a “no-hire” list to hinder their job prospects after completing residency.

After MedPage Today published a story about a doctor-led Black Lives Matter protest in June that quoted some NYU Langone residents, a member of hospital leadership reportedly sent an internal email to other NYU employees that referred to those who spoke to reporters as “the usual ones.”

Carmody, in her reply to this email, told her superiors that their “response was completely inappropriate because it indicated to her that NYU’s leadership was focused on monitoring and retaliating against its residents, specifically those who were and have advocated for female and minority persons,” the complaint stated.

The lawsuit noted that Carmody was pressed by a superior to reveal if two of her mentees — one, a woman of color who had spoken to numerous media outlets about “equal rights initiatives such as racism in the health system,” and another, who had been outspoken about gender equality and feminism — had been involved in the crafting of the letter.

She asserted that she refused to answer this inquiry, but that this superior found out that they had signed the letter through other means. In retaliation, both residents were “blacklisted”; when Carmody pushed back on this, her superior “expressed his heightening impatience with such efforts by warning Dr. Carmody to stop,” the lawsuit said.

However, Carmody’s termination came in direct response to an incident that occurred in November 2020, during which Carmody treated a “VIP” patient — the spouse of a good friend of a high-ranking NYU Langone official — for a urinary tract and kidney infection. After providing her with medication to treat the infections, Carmody, who was overseeing the patient’s treatment by resident physicians, reportedly received a six-page letter from the patient’s spouse, claiming that his wife later stayed overnight at the observation unit at Lenox Hill Hospital, where she was treated for sepsis stemming from a kidney infection.

Carmody’s complaint pointed out various inconsistencies in the letter from the VIP patient’s spouse; namely, that it is standard protocol not to admit any patient showing signs of sepsis to a hospital’s observation unit. The document also stated that the VIP patient was prescribed the oral antibiotic levofloxacin (Levaquin) upon her release from Lenox Hill, a medication “that has similar efficacy to the cefpodoxime initially prescribed by Dr. Carmody in treating a kidney infection and is also not a treatment for sepsis.”

According to the lawsuit, Carmody’s superior told her that it was her charting practices, not her medical management, that led to her termination on Dec. 6, 2020. (The same supervisor had previously told her that the patient was “doing fine” and that the situation would “blow over,” she claimed.) Carmody recorded that she herself had examined the patient, rather than one of the residents under her supervision, in the VIP patient’s chart; this, her superior reportedly said upon her firing, was an act of fraud that could have been reported to the state of New York for prosecution.

However, the complaint stated, the charting system through which all NYU Langone patient records are entered provides no other option. Other emergency departments — such as the one at Bellevue Hospital — have charting options to indicate that the patient was treated by a resident under the supervision of a physician.

“Unlike options that prevent overbilling in teaching hospitals … this one attestation option appearing in the ED’s Epic template results in automatic billing for multiple examinations when selected,” the lawsuit stated.

A review of the incident by the departmental review committee, held in March 2021, allegedly found that Carmody “had followed the same practices and procedures as every other attending physician in the Defendant Langone ED, including the way in which she entered the patient information and signed the Epic attestation for VIP Patient’s medical chart.”

The lawsuit asserted that in recordings from Zoom meetings that occurred in the days following her termination, the NYU Langone official who fired Carmody insisted that “the patient almost died” and that the case constituted fraud. Several attendees, however, came to her defense.

“If the person who’s most respected in our department is taken down in front of everybody, the clear message is anybody can be taken down,” one attending physician said, according to the complaint. Another reportedly remarked that “Dr. Carmody had ‘a target on her back’ long before she was terminated.”

In response to Carmody’s complaint, “NYU Langone Health has no comment as to the allegations in the complaint and obviously will zealously defend against these meritless claims in court,” a spokesperson for NYU Langone wrote in an email to MedPage Today.