Our firm is proud to announce that for the 13th consecutive year it has been named by U.S. News – Best Lawyers ® “Best Law Firms” a Tier 1 Firm in New York City for:
Our NY personal injury law firm is proud to announce that Allan Zelikovic obtained a $1 million settlement for a delivery driver killed in Manhattan.This medical malpractice/wrongful death case involved a 51-year-old delivery driver who presented to Wyckoff Heights Hospital with chest pain. He was examined in the emergency room and determined to be suffering from a myocardial infarction (heart attack) and atherosclerosis. A decision was made to transfer the patient to another hospital equipped to perform coronary angiography and place percutaneous coronary artery stents to re-open the coronary arteries thereby restoring the blood flow to the heart.
Our Managing Partner Ben Rubinowitz conducted Grand Rounds for the Department of Radiology at Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC. The talk was titled ”Preventing Medical Malpractice.”
In this presentation Mr Rubinowitz showed real life examples of medical negligence and then cross examined various residents, fellows and attending physicians to educate them on medical errors that had taken place in the past that resulted in injury and death to his clients.
The point of the lecture and demonstration was to teach medical residents and attending physicians about medical failures which were preventable — but when not properly and timely addressed, those failures and omissions often lead to catastrophic injury.
dtronic HeartWare Ventricular Assist Device (HVAD) device caused the wrongful death of more than 3,000 people since it was introduced on the market more than 10 years ago. The sale and distribution of the heart pump was stopped in June last year but many patients still have the pump implanted in them. Now some of the batteries powering the device might be deadly too.Medtronic announced last May that a model of battery that was powering the Medtronic HeartWare Ventricular Assist Device (HVAD) was defective and that it could cause serious personal injury or death if it was not changed for a new battery. An urgent Medical Device Correction letter was sent out by Medtronic to all affected customers on May 5th recalling 429 devices manufactured in April 2021. Then a month later, after the company received 1,159 complaints including 6 injuries and one death, the recall of the same model of batteries was extended to those that were distributed since January 2009.
While too many hospitals in the US are sacrificing patient safety for profit, a small number of them are dedicated to focus on healthcare safety and quality.The Leapfrog Group is a nonprofit organization helping consumers to make informed decision. To be part of the list, hospitals that previously received a A grade from a previous assessment went through an additional assessment of 39 performance measures in the 7 following categories:
Hospitals are one of the favorite targets of ransomware hackers because hospitals simply can’t afford to have their IT down as it can cause severe harm or even death to patients. As a result when a hospital has its systems blocked by hackers it might be more willing to pay a ransom than any other type of organization in order to get their systems working again.
Recently, a debt collection company working with 657 healthcare providers announced that it had been the victim of a cyber attack. Hackers were able to obtain patients information including their name, address, social security number and medical information. It is unclear so far how many patients have been affected but this might have been of of the largest healthcare data breach of 2022.
Our NY Medical Malpractice attorneys Jeffrey Bloom and David Larkin settled a wrongful death case for $3 Million for the death of a man overdosed with narcoticsOur client, a man in his fifties, walked into the emergency department of his local hospital with complaints of abdominal pain. He was dead within hours. He left behind a wife and three grown sons.
Our Managing Partner, Ben Rubinowitz, has been invited to speak at the American Urologic Association’s annual meeting in New Orleans this Friday.
This is one of the largest medical conferences in the world and is attended by more than 25,000 Urologists.
Due to the successful results our firm has had in medical malpractice cases, Ben has been asked to share his knowledge with treating urologists.
Every year the ECRI institute releases a list of top main concerns that may lead to patient harm and medical malpractice. While cybersecurity was one of the main concerns in the previous years, the ongoing Covid 19 crisis put a lot of pressure on hospital staffing and “staffing shortages” is now at the top of the concerns followed by worker’s mental health and racial disparity in treatments.
The pandemic emphasized concerns that were already latent in the American healthcare system but that have worsened during the pandemic:
More than 150 models of medical devices manufactured by more than 100 manufacturers and equipped with PTC Axeda agent and Axeda Desktop Server have dangerous cybersecurity vulnerabilities that could potentially harm patients. The Axeda agent and Axeda Desktop server sold by PTC are components allowing one or more people to view and operate the same remote desktop, through the Internet. However, it was recently found that hard-coded credentials were used in these components making them particularly vulnerable to cyber attacks. Hard code credential is a practice used by software developers in which authentication data such as password are embedded directly in the source code. This practice was identified 9 years ago as a significant cybersecurity threat and is considered outdated and dangerous. It is particularly concerning that medtech vendor PT is still selling products using this technology, especially products providing remote support functionality which are among the most targeted by hackers. Hard code credential vulnerabilities, if exploited, allow hackers to fully access the system, execute remote code, change the configuration, read or save changes directly to files and folders on the user’s device, access user’s login information and flood the targeted device or network with traffic until the target cannot respond or simply crashes, preventing access for legitimate users. Designing medical devices containing such outdated and dangerous components is negligence that can cause injury or death to patients.
Defective medical devices with cybersecurity flaws are considered the number one health technology hazards in 2022 by the ECRI Institute. The FDA issued a cybersecurity alert and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an advisory with a detailed description of the vulnerabilities, recommendations to mitigate them and a list of the main manufacturers using Axeda agent and Axeda Desktop servers in some of their products. Among them are Accuracy, Agilent, Bayer, BD, Elektra, GE, Roche Diagnostic, Smith Medical and Varian. These manufacturers have all released their own information in regards to affected products.
Read more in Medtech Dive
New York Personal Injury Attorneys Blog