Jury finds Fairview liable in $84M heart attack death

A Hennepin County jury issued an $84 million malpractice verdict against Fairview Health Services on 29 September for the family of a 53-year-old man who died from heart attack complications after allegedly receiving an inadequate medical evaluation from a clinician at the hospital. It is one of the largest malpractice awards in the state’s history. Part of the award reflects what the man would have earned in the years ahead.Two consultations that failed to adequately address his chest painReece Devlin, 53, moved to Minneapolis from Australia and spent years as a partner at Ernst & Young. In October 2022, he went to an M Health Fairview Uptown clinic with chest pain, according to court records. A Fairview clinician ordered an electrocardiogram to check the electrical activity of Devlin’s heart. The practitioner stated that Devlin’s Mayo Clinic executive physical records had also been reviewed at the time. Brandon Thompson, the attorney who represented Reece Devlin’s wife and two children in the medical malpractice lawsuit against Fairview Health Services, argued that computer records contradicted this claim. The records reportedly showed that the practitioner had visited another patient and reviewed the records of 11 others instead.