A group of independent emergency physicians in Oregon who sued their own hospital system are celebrating after the employer agreed to scrap its original plan to replace the group with an out-of-state corporate staffing firm.
Eugene Emergency Physicians (EEP) sued PeaceHealth in late March, arguing that the health system violated the state's corporate medicine law. The parties reached a preliminary settlement last week, which the physicians involved called a major win.
"It was David versus Goliath ... and you know something, we ripped them to shreds," Daniel McGee, MD, of EEP and a plaintiff in the lawsuit, told MedPage Today.
In February, after more than 3 decades of staffing with the EEP team, executives at PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend announced they had chosen to partner with the Atlanta-based ApolloMD instead. Within weeks, EEP sued PeaceHealth and ApolloMD.
Even without a ruling, the case represents a "major victory" in the battle against the corporate practice of medicine, said Robert McNamara, MD, chief medical officer of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM), which helped fund the litigation.
