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Family awarded $13.5 million in hospital death

Quality Improvement Monitor, November 7, 2008

A superior court jury awarded $13.5 million this week to the family of a Hopkinton, MA, woman who died after receiving experimental therapy at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, the Boston Globe reports.

The jury deliberated for nine hours over two days before awarding the family $9.4 million plus interest in the July 2003 death of Amy Altman, 40, the mother of two young daughters. The Globe reports that the jury found that Altman’s death could have been prevented if Dana-Farber physicians had investigated why she suffered from chronic diarrhea, which began during an experimental treatment protocol for a tumor.

Altman’s lawyer, Robert Higgins, said she developed the diarrhea two months after she began receiving chemotherapy every two weeks instead of the standard treatment of once every three weeks for Ewing’s sarcoma. The treatment had never been tried on an adult, as Ewing’s sarcoma usually strikes adolescents and children.

Higgins said Altman’s complaints were dismissed as an expected side effect, but she soon began suffering extreme abdominal pain and could not urinate. She died less than two days after being admitted to Brigham and Women’s Hospital for an infection by a type of flesh-eating bacteria that had caused the diarrhea, the Globe reports.

The hospital had no comment on the case. Click here to read the article.

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