Probe focuses on heart stents at St. Joseph Medical Center

Probe focuses on heart stents

St. Joseph Stent Lawsuit

Vicki Marrs had a stent implanted in 2008 after she was told she had 90 percent blockage in an artery. She's since learned her blockage was closer to 10 percent.

St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, whose cardiology business was a focus of a federal health-care fraud investigation, notified hundreds of its heart patients that they may have received expensive and potentially dangerous coronary implants they didn't need.

An internal review, begun last May at the behest of federal investigators and in response to a patient complaint, turned up 369 patients with stents that appear to have been implanted in their arteries unnecessarily, CEO Jeffrey K. Norman said. Patients began receiving letters alerting them to the finding in December 2009, and more notifications were expected."We take our interaction and the care of our patients with the utmost seriousness, and so we wanted to alert patients and their physicians to what we found," said Norman.

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