Is A Lab A Health Care Professional? An Update On “Everyone’s Worst Nightmare”

Two years ago I authored a blogpost, Everyone’s Worst Nightmare , about a family’s experience with genetic variant interpretation, communication (or lack of) by healthcare providers with families, and an outcome that couldn’t be more tragic – the death of a child. Here I am providing an update on the legal status of the lawsuit brought on behalf of the child by his mother. In my original posting, I did not identify the child’s syndrome or the specific court case. However, since then, the story has been picked up by a variety of media outlets (Turna Ray at GenomeWeb has done the best reporting on the details) and it now being a matter of public record, I have included some particulars here .

Briefly, the story began about 12 years ago when the child was experiencing multiple, intractable seizures and had a clinical picture consistent with Dravet syndrome. Unbeknownst to the parents, genetic testing was ordered and the child was found to carry a mutation in SCN1A, the gene linked to Dravet syndrome. The mutation was interpreted as a variant of uncertain significance, though at the time there was reason to believe that it could be pathogenic. Based on the genetic test result, it was felt that the child did not have Dravet syndrome and was kept on a sodium channel blocker, which unfortunately is contra-indicated for patients with this syndrome. Not long afterwards the child died of seizures at the age of two.

The patient did not find out that genetic testing had been performed until about 7 years after the test was ordered. Shortly after the mother learned of the test result and inquired into its meaning, the lab reclassified the variant as pathogenic.

In February 2016 the mother initiated a lawsuit on behalf of her deceased child in the fifth judicial circuit court in Richland County, South Carolina. The defendant’s lawyers requested that the case be dismissed on the grounds of restrictions imposed by the state’s statute of repose, i.e., a law that states legal action must be initiated within a certain period from the time the alleged offense occurred (it is similar to but slightly different from a statute of limitations). The defendants presented the argument that a genetic testing laboratory is a licensed health care provider and South Carolina has a 3 year statute of repose for lawsuits brought against licensed health care providers. Since the events took place a decade ago, the defendants asserted that the case should be dismissed. The plaintiff countered that, under South Carolina state law, a genetic testing lab that is separate from a hospital or a clinic cannot be considered a licensed health care provider and therefore the statute of repose did not apply. The plaintiff contended that this is a case of ordinary negligence, not medical malpractice, since the lab should not be considered a licensed health care provider and therefore the suit should be allowed to proceed.

The case was then sent to the US District Court in 2017 to rule on whether dismissal was warranted based on the defendant’s argument that the lab is a licensed health care provider and therefore the statue of repose applies. The federal judge then referred the case to the South Carolina Supreme Court to, as the legal lingo goes, certify the question of whether a lab can be considered a licensed health care provider under the specific provisions of South Carolina Code of Laws Section 38-79-410. Although we may have our individual opinions on this question, it is strictly a matter of law that varies by state. South Carolina law defines a licensed health care provider as “physicians and surgeons; directors, officers, and trustees of hospitals; nurses; oral surgeons; dentists; pharmacists; chiropractors; optometrists; podiatrists; hospitals; nursing homes; or any similar category of licensed health care providers.” (italics added)

The South Carolina Supreme Court heard the case on February 14th, 2018. For those of you who have never witnessed a state Supreme Court hearing, I recommend that you watch the ~40 minute video of the session. The court’s decision, which will be about whether the suit can proceed rather than determining liability, will depend on how it interprets whether a laboratory is a “similar category” to the health professionals listed in the state code. I thought that the five justices were insightful and asked thoughtful questions. As a side note, at about the 29-30 minute mark of the hearing, Justice Few gives a shout out to our genetics colleagues at the Greenwood Genetics Center.

The court does not have a set date on when they will issue an opinion; as the Supremes, they call that shot (the South Carolina Supreme Court’s motto is Nil ultra, which roughly translates as “Nothing is above us”). Typically, though, the time frame on a ruling is in weeks or months. If the court decides that the lab is not a healthcare provider, then the plaintiff’s suit will be allowed to continue, though I got the sense that the court felt that even if the ruling were in favor of the defendants that the plaintiff may still have alternate legal pathways to pursue a case. I will keep the good readers of The DNA Exchange posted on important developments in this case, which I suspect will continue to drag on for some time after the Supreme Court’s ruling.

With the rapid expansion of genetic testing in the clinical and consumer spaces, and the growing involvement of non-genetics professionals in ordering genetic testing, bad clinical outcome scenarios are likely to become more common. Critical questions about variant interpretation and legal liability aside, from a genetic counseling standpoint, this case highlights the importance of clear and ongoing communication with patients and their families about the limits and clinical interpretation of genetic testing. This can be extraordinarily difficult when a family is trying to cope with caring for a child with a life-threatening disease, but genetic counselors are trained to work precisely in those situations. Genetic testing may be simple to order and widely available but it benefits no one without good clinical care and counseling.