Eighteen former Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center patients or their estates have sued the Medford hospital for $303 million, claiming a nurse caused bacterial infections by swapping their fentanyl with tap water.
Filed Tuesday in Jackson County Circuit Court by attorneys David deVilleneuve and Shayla Steyart, the lawsuit is the second to be filed over similar allegations.
The suit does not name any specific nurse, but local prosecutors in June charged former Asante nurse Dani Marie Schofield with 44 counts of felony second-degree assault over claims that she had hurt patients by stealing the opioid and using patients’ IV bags to administer unsterile water instead. Schofield has denied wrongdoing.
“We will get justice for these people and make sure this never happens again,” deVilleneuve told The Lund Report.
The new suit represents the latest challenge for Asante Health since reports emerged late last year that the hospital had been informing patients’ families of the suspected drug swap. In January, The Lund Report first reported on the hospital’s settlement of a lengthy federal probe into Medicare fraud, which cost it $430,000.
In February, the Rogue Valley Times reported on “workforce reductions” at Asante, though the number of layoffs was not disclosed. In August, employees publicly raised concerns that Asante Ashland Community Hospital could close, which a hospital executive later denied in an email to employees. Additionally, employees of Asante organized last year while criticizing management.
Executives have largely declined to comment for the public on the legal cases or on community concerns swirling around the nonprofit health system, in contrast to how other nonprofit community hospital systems often respond in similar situations.
The earlier lawsuit named Schofield and claimed that 65-year-old Horace Earl Wilson, then 65, died of a fatal bacterial infection while receiving treatment at Asante Rogue in 2022 for broken ribs and a lacerated spleen after falling off a ladder.
New lawsuit makes broader allegations
The new suit makes additional and sweeping claims that Asante Rogue did not do enough to address “prior drug misuse” and for “failing to follow industry standards that would have prevented foreseeable employee misuse of pain medications,” adding that the health system “should have known of the high likelihood of drug misuse by its employees given that Asante has had repeated instances of drug misuse by its employees in the past.”
The suit does not include specifics on the earlier alleged drug thefts, however InvestigateWest has reported on one case of drug theft at the hospital described in state documents.
The suit states that patients experienced additional pain and mental anguish after acquiring an infection while receiving care at the hospital. Half the patients named in the suit died from their infections, according to the lawsuit. All of them were also named as victims in prosecutors’ indictment of Schofield.
The lawsuit further states that the hospital failed to “identify the source of bacterial infections in a timely manner” and its employees also exposed patients to “non-sterile needles.”
The hospital reported losses of nearly $20 million in 2022 and 2023, according to state data. The hospital has reported $17 million in profits in 2024, according to the most recent data.
