Florida Medical Malpractice Cases

Fort Myers doctor fined $20000 for prescribing pain pills

A Fort Myers family doctor who prescribed thousands of pain pills to one patient during four visits has been placed on probation and fined $20,000 for committing malpractice, according to state records.

The Florida Board of Medicine signed off on a settlement earlier this month with Dr. Ida Gagliardi, whose last known practice was at 1326 Kingswood Court, for failing to practice medicine within acceptable standards, according to the June 14 final order.

The state Department of Health filed an administrative complaint against Gagliardi this past March 1 stating she violated standards of care when she saw a 41-year-old male patient from Sept. 2, 2009 through Nov. 25, 2009. The patient is not identified in the documents.

The complaint said Gagliardi prescribed the patient with 1,500 tablets of Roxicodone, a brand name pain killer, each of the four times she saw him during the three-month period. The complaint does not disclose how the state came to investigate Gagliardi, whose practice has been in family medicine.

Gagliardi has since left the practice she was last associated with and could not be located for comment. State records indicate she was first licensed in Florida in 1985 and did not hold privileges at any Southwest Florida hospitals.

Besides probation for one year which involves indirect supervision from another physician and the fine, the medical board ordered Gagliardi to pay $4,100 in state fees for its investigation and she must perform 350 hours of community service over two years.

The state of Florida is considered a “pill mill” capital and state lawmakers have passed legislation to crack down on these operations, which includes a prescription drug database to monitor who gets pills to catch “doctor shopping.” The new law also is intended to create tighter regulations on pharmacies and doctor’s practices.

In Gagliardi’s case, the male patient in the complaint first went to see her on Sept. 2, 2009. She had received a copy of some of the patient’s earlier medical records with a pain management physician, which consisted of an MRI from 2000 and other records from 2004 to 2006, the complaint said. The other physician is not identified in the complaint.

Health department investigators said there was no indication that Gagliardi reviewed the three-year-old records or asked for more current records, yet the patient stated on a pain assessment form that he previously been prescribed 1,500 Roxicodone pills. The patient said he suffered from pain for 10 years.

can a medical malpractice case that happened in south carolina be ...

You should talk to a Florida attorney first to make sure (and perhaps they might be able to refer you to a SC attorney), but you will probably have to file the case in South Carolina.

There are several legal doctrines that apply when suing an out-of-state defendant for an out-of-state incident that will make it very hard for you file the case in your home state. The two biggest problems will be whether there are “sufficient contacts” between the doctor and Florida to allow the Florida courts to proceed at all and whether so much of the evidence about the case is in South Carolina that it would be easier for everybody (other than you) to let South Carolina handle the case.

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