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Owens v. Silvia12/22/2003
admit to any reason that they were required to be cognizant of the device during the operation.
E. The Trial Justice Misunderstood Dr. Johnson's Testimony About the Standard of Care
The defendants contend that Dr. Johnson's proffered testimony about the standard of care did not meet the standards set forth in Rule 702 or in DiPetrillo. The defendants cite specifically to how Dr. Johnson opined that the standard of care may, in some circumstances, include moving parts of the patient's body that come into contact with surfaces when a surgical procedure takes an unexpectedly long period to complete. Doctor Johnson, defendants argue, could not state with specificity at what time during the surgery this movement should occur. Additionally, defendants argue, the doctor's opinion on the standard of care did not meet any of the four criteria outlined in DiPetrillo for admitting expert testimony.
(1) The Trial Justice Must Evaluate Reasoning, Not Conclusions of the Expert
The trial justice erred when he evaluated the conclusions Dr. Johnson reached, rather than the validity of the methods Dr. Johnson used to reach those conclusions and his qualifications to do so. As previously noted, Dr. Johnson was more than qualified to testify about the applicable standard of care. Additionally, as this Court noted in DiPetrillo, a trial justice should assess whether the reasoning used in forming an expert conclusion was sound, not whether the conclusions drawn from that reasoning were proper. DiPetrillo, 729 A.2d at 689-90. See, e.g., Ambrosini, 101 F.3d at 140 (the admissibility inquiry focuses not on the expert's conclusions, but on whether the methodologies and reasoning used to reach the expert's conclusions were scientifically valid); Arnold v. Dow Chemical Co., 32 F.Supp.2d 584, 589-90 (E.D.N.Y. 1999) (despite reservations about the conclusions of the expert, the problems associated with the proposed testimony were properly to be resolved by the jury after cross-examination).
Here, the standard of care about which Dr. Johnson was prepared to testify was that the OR team should make sure that nothing exerted pressure on the patient's body that would cut off the blood flow to plaintiff's muscle tissues during the surgery. One conclusion Dr. Johnson reached about the standard of care was that the members of the OR team should comply with this standard by checking non-dependent areas of the body throughout the procedure for shifts in positioning and by discussing with the surgeon the possibility of removing the hip roll that the OR team had placed under Owens's left buttock. In assessing the availability of peer studies to support this conclusion, the trial justice considered -- not whether Dr. Johnson's reasoning was sound in arriving at these conclusions -- but rather whether his conclusions themselves were valid.
The proper inquiry concerning Dr. Johnson's testimony should have focused on whether he reached his conclusions using a scientifically valid method. Here, Dr. Johnson concluded that compliance with the standard of care required the OR team to check the patient's arm and hip roll during this unexpectedly prolonged surgery and that the cause of the patient's injuries was focal pressure applied to these areas during the surgery. In reaching his conclusions, Dr. Johnson described the process by which he assessed Owens's case. He testified that he reviewed it in the same way he would approach a case as a member of a quality-assurance and risk-management committee for a hospital. He perused the patient's anesthesia records and medical records to determine the cause or etiology of the patient's injuries. He also reviewed depositions of the witnesses as th
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