Here are 11 lawsuits involving a physician or group of physicians suing their former employers in the last year:
1. In April, an emergency room physician collected $26 million in a wrongful termination lawsuit against ER staffing company EmCare.
2. In May, three orthopedic surgeons filed a countersuit against Adena Health System in Chillicothe, Ohio, alleging the system retaliated against them and breached their employment contracts. The health system sued former employed surgeons Brian Cohen, MD, Aaron Roberts, MD, and James Thompson, DO, in April, alleging they breached their contracts by urging other physicians to resign from the system
3. In June, a Pennsylvania Hospital physician who was stabbed multiple times by a patient in February sued the hospital. The complaint alleges Philadelphia-based Pennsylvania Hospital and its health system, Penn Medicine, failed to take steps that would have prevented the attack and disregarded employee safety.
4. In August, a gastroenterologist sued Avera McKennan Hospital in Sioux Falls, S.D., alleging he was terminated in August 2020 after seeking mental healthcare and complaining about the hospital's COVID-19 protocols.
5. In August, Preston Boles, DPM, sued Greenwood (Miss.) LeFlore Hospital, accusing the hospital of breaching his contract and racial discrimination after he discovered the hospital paid a colleague more per relative work value unit at Dr. Boles' former podiatric practice.
6. In October, Elizabeth Groshong, DO, CMO of Kona (Hawaii) Community Hospital, sued her former employer, alleging that secret recordings of her taken without her knowledge were heavily edited and used to force her resignation.
7. In October, ophthalmologist George Par, MD, sued Iowa City-based Wolfe Eye Clinic, in which Dr. Par previously had ownership, and Jared Nielsen, MD, Kyle Alliman, MD, and David Saggau, MD, alleging antitrust violations and monopolistic business practices.
8. In December, physicians in the American Academy of Emergency Medicine Physician Group filed a lawsuit against Envision Healthcare, claiming the healthcare services company violated state law by taking over emergency department operations at Placentia (Calif.) Linda Hospital.
9. In December, a court decided the owner of an Atlanta-based medical group and his practice will pay millions to resolve kickback allegations brought by a former employed physician. The physician, Myron Jones, MD, who was formerly employed at Atlanta-based Milton Hall Surgical Associates, alleged the group's founder, owner, medical director and former CEO Jeffrey Gallups, MD, accepted kickbacks from Entellus, a device company, and medical testing lab NextHealth.
10. In December, Leslie Jennings, MD, a physician-owner of Flower Mound (Texas) Hospital, filed a lawsuit against the hospital, claiming it violated Stark Law by repurchasing shares from physicians and unfairly reselling them to younger physicians based on volume or value of their procedures.
11. In February, TeamHealth, a physician staffing firm, agreed to pay physicians millions to settle a lawsuit over unpaid bonuses. The physicians filed a lawsuit against TeamHealth and its subsidiary, Paragon Contracting Services, in 2017, alleging the company shorted its emergency physicians on bonus pay tied to relative value units guaranteed by contract.