Pennsylvania's Largest 2016 Malpractice Verdict: $44.1 Million After Penn Hospital Ignored Rising Anticoagulant Levels and Left Woman Bedridden

In September 2011, Andrea Tate drove herself to the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania to have a benign meningioma removed from her brain. The surgery went as planned. Four days after the procedure, doctors placed Tate on heparin, a standard anticoagulant given after brain surgery to prevent clots, and began tracking her coagulation through a blood test known as the activated partial thromboplastin time, or aPTT.

Over the following days, Tate's aPTT results climbed steadily, from 19 seconds to nearly 32 seconds. Those numbers told a clear story: her blood was thinning beyond the safe range. But instead of reducing the heparin or switching to a different protocol, the hospital's staff simply stopped ordering the monitoring tests. For two days, no aPTT readings were taken. Heparin continued to flow.

Three days later, nurses found Tate unconscious. A massive cerebral hemorrhage, fed by the uncontrolled anticoagulation, had flooded her brain. When the aPTT was finally measured again, it had reached 61 seconds. The bleed left her unable to walk or perform basic daily tasks. A woman who had driven herself to the hospital for an outpatient-level procedure left it bedridden and largely paralyzed.

Robert Ross of Ross Feller Casey filed suit against both the hospital and Tate's attending physician. At trial, the central argument was straightforward: the monitoring protocol existed precisely to catch this kind of drift, the data showed the drift happening in real time, and staff chose to look away. The hospital had offered $15 million to settle before trial; Ross rejected it and demanded $31 million.

The jury deliberated for nearly seven hours across two days. On April 27, 2016, after thirteen days of trial, it returned a verdict of $44.1 million. The panel assigned 65 percent of liability to the hospital and 35 percent to the attending physician. The hospital said it would appeal. The verdict was the largest medical malpractice award reported in Pennsylvania for 2016, more than double the state's biggest malpractice verdict from the year before.