A medical malpractice lawsuit that pitted high-profile UPMC surgeons against one other amid romantic entanglement, secret recordings and fraud allegations has settled.
Details of the settlement were not disclosed in paperwork filed Jan. 5 to end the case in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court.
A spokesman for UPMC, one of the defendants, had no comment Friday.
A message left with an attorney for the plaintiff, Bernadette Fedorka of Aliquippa, was not immediately returned.
Fedorka received a left lung transplant March 9, 2018.
That December, she filed a malpractice suit against UPMC and several physicians there, claiming that the donor lung was oversized for her and of marginal quality.
She included among the defendants the former chairman of cardiothoracic surgery, Dr. James Luketich, even though she was never his patient.
Fedorka sued Luketich in his role assigning surgeons to the lung transplant center. The lawsuit alleged that Luketich did not properly staff the center and that she received a lung that she should not have, resulting in long-term injuries. She remained in intensive care until July 31, 2018, according to the lawsuit.
Since the transplant, she has had numerous complications, including rejection of the donor lung and end-stage renal failure requiring dialysis.
The lawsuit accused the defendants of negligence for failing to properly prepare the donor lung for transplantation and for failing to follow proper procedures during the procurement and transplantation process.
Fedorka’s complaint was followed closely by a federal whistleblower complaint against UPMC filed by Dr. Jonathan D’Cunha, who worked there from 2012 to 2019 and was the surgical director of lung transplantation.
The Department of Justice ultimately took over the D’Cunha complaint, accusing UPMC and Luketich, D’Cunha’s boss, of submitting false claims to Medicare and failing to follow medical standards for surgery that put patients at risk.
The federal government said that Luketich would schedule as many as three complex surgical procedures at the same time, forcing him to move between operating rooms and sometimes hospitals.
The schedule, the complaint said, forced patients to endure additional hours of anesthesia which led to complications, including one patient who lost portions of a hand and another who lost part of a lower leg.
The federal action settled in February with the defendants agreeing to pay $8.5 million and create a corrective action plan for Luketich. In addition, the agreement called for a yearlong, third-party audit of his billings.
Luketich stepped down in June as chair of cardiothoracic surgery. His attorney, Efrem Grail, had no comment on the conclusion of the Fedorka case.
He did say, though, that during the time he represented Luketich, he heard from many patients who said they would not be alive if Luketich hadn’t taken their cases and operated on them.
Fedorka’s case, which spanned five years, was disrupted when, in May 2022, Luketich filed a motion to stop the parties from using a secretly obtained recording from 2018 between Luketich and his doctor, who had been treating him for years with suboxone, which he said was for back pain.
Luketich accused D’Cunha and another former UPMC doctor, Lara Schaheen, of conspiring against him and reporting his suboxone use in retaliation for him confronting them about an improper relationship and academic misconduct.
Judge Philip Ignelzi held several days of contentious hearings on the matter in 2022. In July, he issued an order denying the motion.
Paula Reed Ward is a TribLive reporter covering federal and Allegheny County courts. She joined the Trib in 2019 after spending nearly 17 years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where she was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team. She is the author of “Death by Cyanide.” She can be reached at pward@triblive.com.