INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — The doctor vs. doctor defamation suit between former Indian River Medical Center emergency room physician David Gillis and vascular surgeon Pranay Ramdev will continue, Judge Cynthia Cox said last week, denying the motion of Ramdev’s attorney to dismiss the suit against his client.
Arguing that Ramdev’s comments about Gillis were his right as the chief of surgery on the Medical Executive Committee and should have remained confidential under the rules of physician peer review, attorney Ted Mortell told the judge: “If the plaintiff (Gillis) wanted to get around this, he needed to plead intentional fraud with a lot more particularity.”
His point: Gillis did not show that Ramdev knew he was being deceptive when he told a number of hospital administrators and doctors that Gillis was “incompetent and a liar.” And, without proof of intentional deception, Ramdev was protected from a defamation lawsuit by the rules for peer review.
For this reason, the suit should be dismissed, Mortell told the judge.
But Gillis’ attorney, Buck Vocelle, countered: “We allege it was a personal vendetta by Dr. Ramdev…. What we have is a wild man going around, trying to get Dr. Gillis fired.”
The war between the two doctors goes back to Ramdev’s settling a medical malpractice suit in early 2013, after Gillis said in a depostition that it was his “logical conclusion” that Ramdev would see a patient with a life-threatening condition, after two phone conversations with Ramdev.
But Ramdev didn’t see the patient who was transferred to Lawnwood Medical Center, later saying it was not his responsibility since he wasn’t on-call there, and the patient died, resulting in the malpractice suit against him.
Ramdev blamed Gillis for having to settle the suit for hundreds of thousands of dollars and told IRMC doctors it was his “life’s mission to prevent Dr. Gillis from ever working at this hospital again….” according to Gillis’ defamation suit filed in September of this year.
While Gillis was not fired from IRMC, he was not rehired — unlike several other ER doctors who kept their jobs — when a new management team took over the hospital’s emergency room.
“Ramdev told other physicians Gillis was incompetent. Gillis had a favorable relationship with both IRMC and Emergency Physicians of Central Florida until Ramdev interfered with those relationships,” Vocelle told the Court, Wednesday.
“When we get to depositions, the facts will bear this out,” said Vocelle, right before Judge Cox ruled that the defamation suit against Ramdev should continue.