Background Facts
William “Bill” Pratt and his wife, Rita Pratt, moved from Florida to Rock Hill, South Carolina in February 2015, to be
closer to their oldest daughter and her two young children. Around 12:30 a.m. on March 2, 2015, Pratt fell down a flight of stairs at the daughter’s home. When the daughter found Pratt at the bottom of the stairs, he was “[b]loody, battered,
broken, [and in the] fetal position. There was blood everywhere, all over the wall, down the wall. His teeth were knocked out. His head was opened.” Emergency medical services transported Pratt to Piedmont Medical Center (PMC), where emergency medicine physician Jonas Varaly and nurse Jeleesa Heyward treated him. Pratt’s chief complaints were rib and head pain.
Dr. Varaly ordered several diagnostic tests including, but not limited to, CT scans of the cervical spine, chest, and brain. Virtual Radiology Corporation initially read these scans as negative, but Dr. Gilleland, of Rock Hill Radiology Associates, read the chest CT scan as showing nine non-displaced rib fractures. Although Dr. Gilleland recorded his reading at 8:22 a.m. and placed it in Pratt’s medical record, he never called it in to the emergency room or otherwise notified Dr. Varaly of the fractures or of any discrepancy in his reading versus that of Virtual Radiology.
Within a few hours of his arrival in the emergency room, Pratt was discharged with a prescription for Percocet and instructions to follow up with Carolina Ortho Surgery Associates in two to three days. EMS transported him back to his daughter’s home, where he spent the next thirty-six hours on a sofa. On the morning of March 4, EMS transported Pratt to the emergency department at Carolinas Medical Center-Pineville (CMC) with complaints of difficulty walking, chest pain, and back pain. There, he had another chest CT, which again identified the nine non-displaced rib fractures.
Pratt was intubated and airlifted to Carolinas Medical Center-Main. A few days later, he was diagnosed with pneumonia. On March 16, Pratt went into respiratory distress, followed by renal failure. Pratt was discharged to palliative care on March 21; he died on March 23, 2015.
Rita Pratt filed a South Carolina medical malpractice wrongful death action alleging that the defendants were negligent in failing to follow the policy in place at PMC “to resolve the discrepancy between the interpretation of Dr. Gilleland and the teleradiologist” and in “failing to notify [Pratt’s] treating physicians of the concerning CT Scan results.”
The South Carolina medical malpractice wrongful death jury returned defense verdicts for Dr. Varaly on all claims and for the defendants on the wrongful death claim, but found in Rita Pratt’s favor on the survival and loss of consortium claims. The jury allocated fault at 90% to Dr. Gilleland and 10% to Rock Hill Radiology, awarding damages of $360,000 on the survival claim and $640,000 for loss of consortium. The jury further found the defendants were reckless or grossly negligent, rendering inapplicable the statutory limitation on noneconomic damages. The jury did not award punitive damages.
The South Carolina Court of Appeals affirmed the verdict in its January 15, 2025 Opinion: “The circuit court’s orders denying Appellants’ motions to alter or amend; denying the post-trial motions for JNOV and/or a new trial absolute; requiring the jury to allocate fault; declining to reduce the verdict pursuant to the statutory noneconomic damages caps; and granting Wife’s requested setoff allocation are AFFIRMED.”
Pratt v. Amisub of SC, Inc. d/b/a Piedmont Medical Center, Appellate Case No. 2020-000838.
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