Houston surgeon named in whistleblower case performed heart surgery on woman weeks before she died, family says
A Harris County woman says her mother died just weeks after she had heart surgery in 2017. The surgeon who operated was recently named in a $15 million settlement.
HOUSTON — The family of a woman who underwent open heart surgery at Baylor St. Luke’s Hospital is speaking out after the doctor who performed those operations was named in a $15 million settlement case and accused of violating regulations.
Sarah Coupland said her mother Rebecca Arcangeli was just 46 years old in 2017 when she started to experience chest pain. At a local hospital, doctors found out that it was something severe.
“They did a full CT scan and discovered and they noticed she had a dissection from an aneurysm,” Coupland said.
After her diagnosis, Arcangeli was flown to Baylor St. Luke's teaching hospital in the Texas Medical Center for an emergency operation. Coupland said the surgeon who operated, Dr. Joseph Coselli, indicated that things went well.
“He kind of came out and explained what he had to do, he was very brief though,” she said. “We felt like everything was very much in and out."
A few weeks after the surgery, however, Arcangeli was back in the hospital and later died from a “kink in the replacement [valve] that caused 100 percent blockage,” according to Copeland. Years later, Copeland tells KHOU 11 she had new questions about that post-surgery complication and the man who operated on her mother.
This week, a federal government investigation revealed that Dr. Coselli was one of three surgeons who worked at Baylor St. Luke's between 2013 and 2020, who would allegedly book multiple surgeries at once and allow unqualified medical residents to work unsupervised as they [the surgeons] rotated between operations.
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The doctors named in the federal investigation, including Dr. Coselli, Dr. David Ott, and Dr. Joseph Lamelas, would allegedly continue to bill Medicare as if they were present during the entirety of the overlapping surgeries.
Looking back, Copeland said she feels there were signs medical staff did not pay enough attention to her mother. While she understands she’ll never truly know if Coselli was negligent, she still wishes a different doctor had performed the surgery.
“I wish we could’ve known and we could have been a little bit pickier about who was handling someone we care about,” she said.
The allegations against the St. Luke's surgeons stem from a 2019 whistleblower complaint, which ultimately prompted a federal investigation and a $15 million settlement. Coupland said her family was not involved in that aspect of the case.
In a statement Monday, a spokesperson for Baylor St. Luke's said the settlement was about resolving a “documentation and billing issue” and it was “not an admission of liability.”
The hospital also tells KHOU 11 that officials "have confidence" in Dr. Coselli. He is still employed as a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine; a role that requires him to perform surgeries.
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