Ravi Sood to be paid $183,000.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: A US court has ordered the University of Iowa (UI) to pay a former employee compensation, for taking away his clinical privileges back in 2008, when he was a subordinate doctor at the University’s Carver College of Medicine.
The former employee, Ravi Sood, is to be paid $183,000, the court ruled.
Sood’s troubles with UI began in July of 2008, when he was initially hired as a full-time Visiting Associate to work under Dr. Michael Graham, who was the hospital’s Director of Nuclear Medicine. Soon after beginning his job, however, many of Sood’s colleagues complained that he did really know what he was doing.
After hearing from enough people that Sood was not fit for the job, his billing privileges were revoked in October, followed by his clinical privileges, by Graham. Sood was also told that his contract with the University, which gave him a salary of $100,000, was not going to be renewed the following June.
Sood took his case to higher-ups, who realized that Sood should never have had his clinical privileges stripped from him regardless of his performance, because such action requires the approval of a committee, which must investigate and review the case.
A lawsuit against the University was then filed in 2010, for breach of contract and violation of civil rights, with the Iowa Board of Regents also listed as a defendant.
Graham has blamed the revocation of Sood’s clinical privileges on a departmental error, saying he never had any intention of taking away more than Sood’d billing abilities. Now the courts have ruled in favor of Sood, although an appeal by UI is certainly possible.
Of the $183,000 sum, $37,000 will go to Sood as restitution for damages done to him, while the remainder is compensation for legal fees accrued during the litigation process.