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Doctors' credentials wrong in directory

Regional Medical Center Bayonet Point lists nine cardiologists with inflated certifications. The hospital says it was a clerical error.

By COLLINS CONNER
Published January 16, 2005

HUDSON - More than a third of the doctors who open clogged arteries at one of the biggest heart centers in the Tampa Bay area do not have the credentials the hospital claimed they have.

Despite being described in the hospital's current physician directory as "board certified" in interventional cardiology, nine of 25 doctors performing angioplasties at Regional Medical Center Bayonet Point have no such certification. In its previous directory, 13 of 30 heart doctors were listed with inaccurate credentials.

Doctors are not required to have interventional certification to perform angioplasties; the certification, however, shows the physician has extensive training and experience in the field and has passed a written exam.

Interventional cardiologists perform angioplasties, threading a catheter to the coronary artery, where a tiny balloon is inflated to flatten plaque against the artery wall. The procedure is used to relieve the pain of angina.

More than 2,000 angioplasties are performed at Regional's heart institute each year. In December, after hiring an expert panel to review those procedures, Regional suspended nine cardiologists from performing them. The experts found the doctors, in some instances, performed angioplasties on arteries that were not significantly clogged with plaque, propped open clogged arteries with stents of the wrong size or type, used incorrect or inadequate medicines to treat coronary artery disease or failed to maintain complete records.

Regional has refused to name the suspended doctors; the matter is now under investigation by several regulatory agencies.

Because of that secrecy, the Times could not ascertain whether any of the suspended doctors are among the nine doctors listed with incorrect credentials.

The mistaken listings were the result of clerical errors, said hospital spokesman Kurt Conover. As biographical information was conveyed by the medical staff clerk to the hospital's marketing department, it was misconstrued, Conover said. The doctors in question have interventional privileges at the hospital, not interventional certification, he said.

"We have people (in the marketing department) who are not necessarily clinical" and may not have understood the difference, Conover said.

Conover cautioned that while not board-certified interventional cardiologists, the doctors in question are board-certified cardiologists. Interventional cardiology is "a subspecialty" field, Conover said.

As for the errors in the directories, he said, "it was not an intentional thing to mislead. No one intentionally tried to do anything. It was a simple oversight."

And a long-lasting one.

The nine physicians listed with unearned credentials in the most recent hospital directory were shown with the same incorrect credentials in the previous directory, published in 2002.

Conover said that, had a physician pointed out the error in the earlier directory, it would have been corrected in the 2003/2004 version. Two physicians, Drs. Abdur Rahim and Ricardo Ubillus, were listed with incorrect credentials in the earlier directory and with the correct credentials in the more recent one. Conover said he did not know if Rahim and Ubillus asked the hospital to correct their listings. Neither physician returned a telephone message from the Times.

Conover said all the listings would be fixed in a new directory now being prepared.

The St. Petersburg Times discovered the errors by checking the certification of all 30 Bayonet Point physicians listed as interventional cardiologists with the American Board of Medical Specialties, the umbrella organization for the 24 specialty boards approved by the American Medical Association.

A similar check of interventional cardiologists practicing at Tampa General Hospital and Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater showed that neither facility credited its doctors with incorrect certification.

Having physicians with interventional certification is not required by any of the physician or hospital regulatory agencies, nor is it required for a hospital to receive accreditation.

But such certification is "a sort of Good Housekeeping seal of approval," said Dr. Donald S. Baim of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Baim serves on the certification board's testing committee.

"Some 4,500 physicians in the U.S. have completed this process," Baim said.

"However, that rarely is the case."

At his own hospital, the Methodist DeBakey Heart Center in Houston, Raizner said, 64 percent of the "mainstay physicians" - the doctors performing the vast majority of the angioplasties - are board certified in interventional cardiology.

Much as he encourages physicians to obtain certification, Raizner said, doctors without such credentials can be "technically really excellent."

To get certification, the doctor is tested on knowledge and judgment," Raizner said. "It is not a test of manual skills."

The Bayonet Point doctors who were incorrectly shown as board certified in interventional cardiology in the most recent directory are Andrew Brooks, Akshay Desai, Adel Mohi Eldin, Thomas Mathews, Jogi Reddy Nareddy. B.J. Patel, Christos Pitarys II, Rodney Randall and Stephen Stark. Those doctors' credentials were also incorrectly listed in the 2002/2003 directory, along with Drs. Rahim and Ubillus and Drs. Gangaiah Natarajan and Abdul Khan. The latter two no longer practice at Bayonet Point.

None of the doctors named in this report returned a telephone message from the Times.

[Last modified January 16, 2005, 00:32:15]