A Denver doctor this week settled a lawsuit alleging he caused a mother’s accidental opioid overdose by prescribing too many pain medicines, and experts say the agreement is a sign that legal attempts to address the opioid crisis increasingly may be focused on individual medical providers rather than big drug companies.
Dr. Andrew Hong settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount of money while a jury deliberated after a six-day trial in Denver District Court. The settlement comes as Colorado ramps up its enforcement of dangerous prescribing practices and, at the state level, takes on the pharmaceutical companies that create the addictive medicines. The increased attention on opioid addiction and deaths has prompted widescale change across Colorado’s medical community, medical and legal professionals said.
Hong’s attorney, Scott Rendleman, said he could not comment on the doctor’s case because the settlement is subject to a confidentiality agreement. But he said it’s part of a growing trend of medical professionals facing lawsuits and investigations in connection to opioid prescriptions. In fact, the law firm he works for — Hall, Prangle and Schoonveld — created a dedicated unit of attorneys to defend doctors and medical professionals against lawsuits related to opioids.
“Colorado is very aggressively policing practioners,” he said.
Jennifer Goodridge, 40, died Sept. 9, 2016, of an accidental overdose after taking a cocktail of opioids, muscle relaxers and barbiturates she had been prescribed by Hong. She had been seeing him since 2013 at Metro Multidisciplinary Doctors, and in 2014 he prescribed her with a low dose of Fentanyl administered through a patch to treat neck and back pain, according to the lawsuit.
Over the next two years, Goodridge repeatedly asked for early refills of her prescription, asked for increased dosages and took other controlled substances that she obtained other ways — red flags that she was addicted. Her family became worried and her husband tried to keep her from driving because he believed she had become unsafe, said Anthony Viorst, the family’s attorney.
Hong should have recognized there was a problem, Viorst said.
“She really had a lot of signs for the potential for overdose,” he said. “He knew that she was a risk, we believe, and yet he continued to prescribe.”
Hong said he didn’t know that Goodridge wasn’t taking her medications as prescribed until the lawsuit and didn’t realize that Goodridge had been lying to get early refills of her prescriptions, according to the response to the suit filed by his attorneys. He said he offered her other treatment options and counseled her extensively about the dangers of pain medicines.
Three days before Goodridge died, Hong added a prescription for oxycodone while maintaining her other prescriptions for Oxycontin as well as a muscle relaxant and a migraine medication. He provided them to her a week early because Goodridge lied and said she was traveling the following week.
When Goodridge died Sept. 17, 2016, she left behind her husband and two young children, now 10 and 13 years old.
“They were devastated,” Viorst said.
Hong’s license remains active, though Hong is required within 30 days to report the settlement to the Colorado Medical Board, which oversees physicians licenses. The board will then review the case to see whether it warrants further investigation or discipline.
But Hong already had run afoul of Colorado’s medical board for opioid prescriptions even before the settlement in Goodridge’s case.
Hong was admonished in June for prescribing high doses of opioids to two patients beginning in August 2014. A panel of the Colorado Medical Board decided not to pursue formal proceedings against his medical license, but issued a written reprimand instead. He ignored signs that the patients were misusing the drugs and the panel found his care “fell below generally accepted standards of practice.”
“Specifically, you failed to timely address aberrant behavior, prescribed opioids in conjunction with benzodiazepine, and failed to coordinate care with another provider who was prescribing controlled substances to your patient,” the reprimand said.
One of the patients — labeled Patient 1 in the letter — had a history of drug abuse and was arrested and in the emergency room multiple times while under Hong’s care, sometimes in connection to her use of opioids. Hong told the board that he was not aware of these problems and thus continued to give her prescriptions, according to the letter.
The Colorado Medical Board does not collect data specifically counting the number of cases it opens related to opioid prescribing, said Lee Rasizer, spokesman for the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies.
The department most recently revised its guidelines for safely prescribing opioids in March, though those don’t have the force of law.
Colorado doctors have been prescribing fewer pain pills, and rules regarding such prescriptions have evolved rapidly over the past 5 years, including requirements that doctors check a database that lists all of a patient’s prescriptions, said Robert Valuck, executive director of the Colorado Consortium for Prescription Drug Abuse Prevention.
“It’s like turning a giant ocean liner around very quickly,” Valuck said. “It doesn’t turn on a dime.”
