Yale New Haven Health is being sued by the family of a deceased patient over alleged substandard care and negligence, they said, that was exacerbated by its hospital’s tele-ICU care model.
The wrongful death lawsuit, filed in a Connecticut court last month and amended on Tuesday, centers on the “totally preventable death” of 26-year-old patient Conor Hylton in 2024 at Bridgeport Hospital.
Hylton had been admitted to its emergency department for treatment with diagnoses including pancreatitis, dehydration and alcohol withdrawal, and later transferred to its ICU when his condition deteriorated, according to the lawsuit. He then became unresponsive, exhibited “seizure-like activity,” vomited and went into cardiac arrest before being pronounced dead.
The lawsuit filed by Hylton’s family cites a subsequent investigation conducted by the state’s Department of Public Health and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which the plaintiffs said “exposed a culture of inattentiveness and substandard care at Bridgeport Hospital Milford Campus that resulted in the death of Conor James Hylton.”
The lawsuit alleges various shortcomings and breakdowns in care procedures, including insufficient monitoring or assessments of Hylton’s condition. He was not seen by the assigned attending physician for several hours, per the amended complaint, requiring an offsite physician to order a needed intubation. The on-site attending physician “did not know how to find the ICU and had to find someone else to show him where it was located,” according to the complaint.
“The state DPH investigation uncovered an incomprehensible level of incompetence at the Milford Hospital ICU—where the name alone requires that comprehensive care is the standard,” Joel T. Faxon, a partner at Faxon Law Group, which is representing the Hylton family, said in a statement. “It’s alarming to think in a supposedly intensive care setting: Where is a doctor? Where are the nurses? How does the emergency doctor not know how to get to the ICU to provide life-saving care?”
Such alleged poor communication, the lawsuit reads, “is especially dangerous to patient care when the hospital is relying on offsite tele-ICU providers to care for its patients.” The complaint notes that the care model “significantly increases hospital profits by allowing the defendants to increase patient capacity while employing fewer intensivists.”
About 18% of U.S. ICU beds were covered by telemedicine as of 2018, with adoption broadly ramping up in subsequent years due to a combination of rising demand, the COVID-19 pandemic and a shortage of trained intensivists.
The lawsuit alleges various failures to inform Hylton’s family of changes in his condition, that he was being transferred to an ICU and that the unit was not staffed with on-site ICU intensivists.
“Had Mr. Hylton or his next of kin (his parents) been informed of the significant risks of admission to the tele-ICU, they never would have consented to such treatment, and Mr. Hylton would have been properly assessed by appropriate on-site providers and he would not have gradually decompensated over time with his airway becoming unstable, and he would not have died,” the lawsuit reads.
Yale New Haven Health, in an emailed statement, said it “is aware of this lawsuit and is committed to providing the safest and highest quality of care possible, however, we are unable to comment on pending litigation.”