Yale New Haven Health is being sued by families of patients who died, alleging substandard care and negligence exacerbated by the hospital’s remote ICU care model.
The wrongful death suit, filed last month in a Connecticut court and amended Tuesday, centers on the “totally avoidable death” of 26-year-old patient Connor Hilton at a Bridgeport hospital in 2024.
According to the lawsuit, Hilton was admitted to the emergency room for treatment with a diagnosis of pancreatitis, dehydration, and alcohol withdrawal, but her condition worsened and she was transferred to the ICU. The man then became unresponsive, exhibited “seizure-like activity,” vomited and went into cardiac arrest before being pronounced dead.
The lawsuit filed by Hilton’s family cites subsequent investigations conducted by the state Department of Public Health and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which the plaintiffs say “exposed a culture of negligence and substandard care at Bridgeport Hospital’s Milford campus that resulted in the death of Connor James Hilton.”
The lawsuit alleges a number of flaws and failures in Hilton’s care procedures, including inadequate monitoring and evaluation of her condition. According to the amended complaint, he was not seen by his assigned primary care physician for several hours and had to direct a necessary intubation to an outside physician. The doctor at the scene “didn’t know how to find the ICU and had to find someone else to tell him where the ICU was,” according to the complaint.
“The state DPH investigation reveals an incomprehensible level of incompetence in Milford Hospital’s ICU, a hospital where comprehensive care is expected to be the standard in name alone,” Joel T. Faxon, a partner at Faxon Law Group, which is representing the Hilton family, said in a statement. “It’s alarming to think about in a supposedly intensive care setting: Where are the doctors? Where are the nurses? How come emergency physicians don’t know how to get to the ICU to provide life-saving care?”
This alleged lack of communication is “particularly dangerous to patient care when hospitals rely on off-site, remote ICU providers for patient care,” the complaint says. The complaint says this model of care “significantly increases hospital profits by allowing Defendants to increase patient capacity while hiring fewer intensivists.”
Approximately 18% of ICU beds in the United States were covered by telemedicine in 2018, and a combination of increased demand, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a shortage of trained intensive care physicians led to a significant increase in adoption in the years that followed.
The lawsuit alleges various failures to inform the family of Hilton’s change in condition, that she would be transferred to the intensive care unit, and that the unit did not have a full-time intensive care intensivist.
“Had Mr. Hilton or his immediate family members (parents) been informed of the significant risks of remote ICU admission, they would never have consented to such treatment, Mr. Hilton would not have been properly evaluated by appropriate medical providers on scene, his airway would not have become unstable and he would not have gradually decompensated over time, and he would not have died,” the complaint states.
“While we are aware of this litigation and are committed to providing the safest, highest quality care possible, we cannot comment on pending litigation,” Yale New Haven Health said in an emailed statement.
