Doc was sued for malpractice 13 times in Illinois. He's in 'good standing' in Missouri

Jay Riseman was sued for malpractice 13 times during a 15-year career as a physician and surgeon in Illinois before coming to practice in Kansas City.

According to court records, in one case he failed to remove a catheter from a 68-year-old patient who then got an infection and died. Another case alleged that an infant died after Riseman gave her too much pre-surgery laxative.

The Illinois medical licensing board disciplined Riseman multiple times for medical errors, but that record didn't follow him when he went to work at three of Kansas City's biggest medical institutions. To this day his Missouri license lists him as a physician in good standing with no negative marks.

Riseman was among 500 doctors who have been disciplined in one state but have a clean license in at least one other identified in an investigation recently published by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and the website MedPage Today. The investigation determined there's no reliable national repository of public information on physicians' licenses.

Riseman's case has legislators in Kansas and Missouri asking whether their own licensing boards are providing the public with enough information about doctors who have been sanctioned in other states.

Riseman declined to comment for this story, instead referring questions to the media relations department at St. Luke's Health System, where he works now as a hospice and palliative care doctor.

St. Luke's spokeswoman Laurel Gifford had told MedPage Today and the Journal-Sentinel that Riseman received more training after leaving Illinois and was approaching his new career in hospice medicine as a chance to move on.

But in an email to the Star she said "the matter is under internal review" and she couldn't answer more questions about it.

After failing as a surgeon in Illinois, Riseman applied for medical licenses in several states, according to MedPage Today and the Journal-Sentinel, which worked with a private company that compiles multi-state dossiers on doctors to do their investigation.

Colorado's medical board denied him. Kansas' medical board granted him a license in 2009 but said he couldn't perform surgery. Missouri granted him an unrestricted license.

When Riseman got to Kansas City, he gave up surgery and reinvented his career.

Kay Hawes, a spokeswoman for the University of Kansas Medical Center, said Riseman was a hospice and palliative medicine fellow at the KU School of Medicine from 2009 to 2010.

In that role, he got supervised clinical training seeing patients at sites that included Kansas City Hospice and Palliative Care and the University of Kansas Hospital. Until last year he was a volunteer clinical faculty member for KU Med as well.

After his fellowship he practiced at Shawnee Mission Health and St. Luke's. Last year he was one of two doctors to earn distinguished service awards from the Missouri Hospice and Palliative Care Association.

The association's CEO, Jane Moore, said the group was caught off guard by reports that he harmed patients in Illinois.

“Missouri Hospice and Palliative Care Association strives to preserve the highest level of excellence within our state hospice industry," Moore said via email. "We are saddened and surprised at the information surrounding Dr. Riseman. Our sympathy and concern goes out to all individuals affected by these circumstances.”

Moore wouldn't say whether the group will rescind the award.

Shawnee Mission Health chief medical officer Larry Botts said through a spokeswoman that his organization knew about the disciplinary actions taken by the Illinois board against Riseman because during its credentialing process it checks all state licenses and the last 10 years of malpractice claims.

Spokeswoman Morgan Shandler said "it’s important to make the distinction here that Shawnee Mission Health did not hire Dr. Jay Riseman, but did admit him to our medical staff with privileges to practice hospice and palliative care only.

"He has not practiced within Shawnee Mission Health for almost two years and never had privileges for surgery or pediatrics. There were no restrictions against him at the time of his admittance to our medical staff."

That's because in 2011, the Kansas medical board lifted its restrictions on Riseman performing surgery in Kansas based on his assurances that he would not perform surgery in Kansas.

Kansas Sen. Barbara Bollier, a Republican from Mission Hills who is also a retired physician, said that on the surface that doesn't make sense. But she said Riseman might have needed an unrestricted license to do certain jobs even if they include no surgical duties, and the board accommodated him.

“One of the things the board doesn’t want to do is restrict people’s ability to earn an income, to work in things they’re allowed to do,” Bollier said.

But she said the board needs to balance that with its responsibility to protect patients, and at least inform them of what physicians have done in other states.

“My question is, are we effectively and appropriately protecting the people of Kansas?" Bollier said. "That’s important. And if not, what is precluding us or causing us to be unable to get information?”

What's a patient to do?

A patient looking for information about Riseman would find nothing about his troubles in Illinois on the Missouri medical board's website and would have to dig to find it on the Kansas site.

For now, the best source of public information about disciplinary actions across state lines comes from the Federation of State Medical Boards' DocInfo web search. Searching for doctors on that site yields lists of states where licensing boards have taken action against them. But it doesn't list the type of action, or the reason the action was taken.

Missouri Board of Registration for the Healing Arts doesn't list licensing actions against its doctors in other states, even though it's common for its doctors to be licensed in multiple states because Missouri has two major metro areas that straddle state lines in Kansas City and St. Louis.

"I would absolutely be interested in taking a look at that," said Missouri Rep. Cody Smith, a Republican who is on the health committee in the Missouri House of Representatives.

"I believe in transparency. In the age of information, when a person goes to get care from a doctor or a certain health system, it would make sense if they could see if there had been any disciplinary action from other states."

The Missouri licensing board has had the legal authority to post information about disciplinary actions in other states since 2011.

But Lori Croy, a spokeswoman for the Missouri Department of Insurance, Financial Institutions and Professional Registration, said the Missouri board also doesn't have the resources to monitor 49 other states that all have different standards.

"The amount of people power required to keep up with what all the other states are doing with regards to disciplinary action would be substantial and the potential for error would be substantial," Croy said.

The MedPage and Journal-Sentinel joint report determined that most state medical boards are like Missouri's in that they don't try to keep their licensing sites updated with what's happening in other states.

Kansas is one of 16 states that does. But even in Kansas, information can be hard to find.

The Kansas Board of Healing Arts website listed some information about Riseman's troubles in Illinois in documents explaining why the board granted him a restricted license in 2009. But it posted nothing under the "other public license actions" section of his page.

In the case of Gladstone psychiatrist Brian Barash, The Star found that his Kansas license page has no information at all about a public reprimand he got from the Missouri board in 2006.

The Missouri licensing board found that in the early 2000s, Barash pre-signed blank prescription forms for patients being seen by an advanced practice nurse who worked with him at Comprehensive Psychiatric Associates.

One of those patients had to be hospitalized after overdosing on Klonopin, a controlled substance.

In addition to publicly reprimanding Barash, the Missouri board required him to get more training.

Barash didn't respond to messages left at Comprehensive Psychiatric Associates and at Signature Psychiatric Hospital in North Kansas City, where he was on call this week. Signature Psychiatric has locations in both Kansas and Missouri.

Kathleen Selzler Lippert, the executive director of the Kansas Board of Healing Arts, said her agency prioritizes getting the disciplinary actions of Kansas' own medical board online first. Other sections of its website that include information on felony convictions, medical malpractice claims and disciplinary actions from other states, "are continually under construction as resources permit," with priority given to more recent incidents.

Bollier said that's not good enough.

“That’s a problem," Bollier said. "If that’s true we need to fix that because we owe it to our people.”

This story was originally published March 25, 2018 at 5:30 AM with the headline "Doc was sued for malpractice 13 times in Illinois. He's in 'good standing' in Missouri."