Before her death, Ms. Berry filed a suit against Dr. Grossmann, Mercy, and its parent company, Catholic Health Initiatives. After her death, her family continued her claim.
By this point, more than a decade had passed since the alleged medical negligence first occurred. This time frame placed the Berry family’s claim outside of Iowa’s 6-year statute of limitations. Citing this fact, Dr. Grossmann, Mercy, and Catholic Health Initiatives sought to have the suit dismissed.
But Ms. Berry’s family stood their ground: Noting that the statute permitted an exception in cases in which the original negligence had been fraudulently concealed, the family argued that its suit move forward.
They encountered a roadblock, however, in district court, which ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to identify the alleged fraudulent concealment as separate from the alleged acts of medical negligence, which the 6-year filing exception required. Having failed in their claim to distinguish concealment from medical negligence, the plaintiffs would not be allowed to proceed with their suit.
The Berry family then asked the Iowa Court of Appeals to review the district court decision. In its review, the appeals court found that the lower court had erred when it disallowed the suit from moving forward. The Berry suit would once again be permitted to continue.
And that’s where matters stood until late last month, when the Iowa Supreme Court weighed in, stating: “The liability-producing conduct was Grossmann’s alleged failure to disclose to Berry the concerning findings on her CT scan. ... But the plaintiffs then rely on these same acts...as his acts of concealment,” which were simply “successive occasions” on which he was said to have acted negligently.
In light of this, argued the high-court justices, the Berry case effectively hinged not on allegations of fraudulent concealment but of medical negligence. And since the state’s statute of limitations was explicit in indicating that such negligence suits had to be brought within the 6-year filing deadline, the lower-court ruling stood, and the Berry case was dismissed.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.