Hedy Migden, a doctor who was abruptly fired last July, leaving thousands of her patients feeling abandoned, has filed a suit against St. Peter’s Health Partners Medical Associates for which she had worked, and Trinity Health Corporation, which owns St. Peter’s. Both say the suit has no merit.

The complaint lists nine causes of action and claims damages, including a loss of salary and benefits, in excess of $2 million. It also requests judgment at trial for “pain, anguish, severe emotional trauma, embarrassment, [and] humiliation” and for damages in connection with “defamation and unlawful age discrimination in violation of New York State Human Rights Law.”

The causes of action include breach of contract, unjust enrichment, breach of duty of good faith and fair dealing, fraud, intentional infliction of emotional distress, tortious interference with contract, defamation, age discrimination and retaliation, and violation of New York Labor Law.

“The most egregious was the damage to my reputation and the damage to patient care,” Migden told The Enterprise this week. “There are still patients trying to reconstruct their care. They didn’t know where their records were. They were left without warning.”

Elmer Streeter, spokesman for St. Peter’s Health System, said on Monday night that, as far as he knew, “We haven’t been served with anything.” He said he couldn’t comment until he had seen the complaint.

The complaint’s filing date is Dec. 21, 2016 in the state’s Supreme Court for Albany County, the bottom rung of the state’s three-tiered court system. An answer is required within 20 days, says the complaint, filed by Joseph Dougherty of Hinman Straub.

On Wednesday night, when The Enterprise called Streeter again, he emailed a statement from St. Peter’s and declined further comment because, he said, that matter is being litigated.

“The charges made in Dr. Migden’s complaint are false and misleading,” the statement says. “St. Peter’s Health Partners Medical Associates’ management and employees invested considerable time, effort and good faith in trying to make the Altamont Internal Medicine and Pediatrics practice successful.

“St. Peter’s Health Partners Medical Associates terminated Dr. Migden’s contract in July 2016 because, in the judgment of its management and physician-led Board of Directors, Dr. Migden’s inappropriate behavior and disruptive actions undermined the organization’s ability to manage and staff the practice, and were inconsistent with our mission and values.

“We intend to vigorously defend our organization, management and staff against these meritless claims, and we are confident that we will prevail,” the statement concluded.

Last summer, soon after Migden was fired, Streeter told The Enterprise “She was terminated for what the practice believed was cause, and she was previously given notice of the behavior she needed to correct to avoid such termination.” Streeter, however, declined to describe this “behavior.”

Streeter said then of suppositions that financial pressures or corporate directives had led to Migden’s firing, “All of those characterizations are inaccurate.” He declined to give the reason, saying it was a “personnel matter.”

Just after Migden was fired, Dr. Barbara Hauser, who has known Migden for 20 years, told The Enterprise, “Her patients have been coming to me in dismay. I saw one of her former patients today…She has a chronic condition and St. Peter’s wouldn’t refill her prescription. It’s patient abandonment. St. Peter’s made no provisions. People are calling and can’t get answers. They made no plans for what would happen the day after they closed the practice.”

Migden had started her practice, called Altamont Internal Medicine and Pediatrics, in Altamont in 1992 when Albany Family Practice pulled out of the village. Migden, who had just completed her four-year joint residency in internal medicine and pediatrics, stepped in, working in Altamont for Albany Medical Center from 1992 to 1995.

When Albany Medical Center no longer wanted the practice, she said, St. Peter’s was interested, and she continued her practice in Altamont, under St. Peter’s, until 1998, when St. Peter’s no longer wanted the practice, and she again worked under Albany Med, until 2000 when she started her own practice, which she ran through 2012. During that time, she changed locations twice, with most of her patients following her.

On Jan. 1, 2013, she started a long-term contract with Saint Peter’s Health Partners, expecting it to last until she retired, Migden said. “All of the people I dealt with in 2013 when I signed the contract — the CEO, the CFO, the COO, the chief medical officer — are gone now,” said Migden at the time she was fired.

In 2013, St. Peter’s had become a member of Trinity Health, headquartered in Livonia, Michigan now with 93 hospitals in 22 states. “Dr. Migden’s suit has no merit,” said Eve Pidgeon, spokeswoman for Trinity Health, on Wednesday. She declined further comment, saying St. Peter’s would be handling the complaint.

This month, Migden began practicing again — with Dr. Mark Oldendorf at 1365 Washington Avenue Extension, close to her previous practice. “He is independent, not beholden to anyone,” Migden told The Enterprise in November when the agreement with Oldendorf was formalized.

Oldendorf said he had sought Migden because “she’s just a plain outstanding physician and patients love her.” He said over 100 of her former patients had called within two days. He also said that independent practitioners can “practice the brand of medicine that is good for the patient and not get caught up in meeting corporate interests.”

“My patients are flocking back and it feels great to be back at work,” Migden said this week. “I am thrilled and my patients are thrilled.”

The firing and its aftermath

On July 5, as several patients waited to see her in her office at 24 Madison Avenue Extension in Albany, Migden says, a woman she’d never met, Kellie Valenti, chief operating officer for St. Peter’s Health Partners, asked for her key. After tending to her patients, Migden was escorted from the office.

Valenti is one of six individuals named as defendants in the complaint, each described as having “supervisory authority” over Migden while she worked for St. Peter’s.

Migden, 68, had seven-and-a-half years left on her contract, which began in 2013. She says she has about 7,000 patients, with 60 to 70 percent of them from the Helderberg Hilltowns and Altamont area.

The complaint says that, in contracting with St. Peter’s, Migden brought thousands of patients with her from her private practice and “believed she would receive the tools to better serve her patients — including proper staffing and electronic medical records — and the security of a long-term employment contract.”

Instead, the complaint says, St. Peter’s “initiated a malicious and deceptive campaign” to destroy her practice, fire her to get out of the contract, and “absorb” her patients to increase revenues.

Further, the complaint alleges, St. Peter’s “withheld necessary and vital staffing” in violation of the contract as well as “actively planting” people in the practice to “sabotage Dr. Migden’s ability to care for her patients.”

The lack of staff led to unreturned phone calls, unfilled prescriptions, and not enough appointments for patients, which, in one example, jeopardized the life of a patient with mental-health problems, the complaint says.

The complaint also says that St. Peter’s paid a younger and inexperienced doctor, who brought in no patients of her own, more money. The doctor in her 30s, it says, was not board certified and got a $20,000 signing bonus as well as a $240,000 annual salary while Migden, who is board certified for both pediatrics and internal medicine, was paid $185,000, according to her original contract.

Exhibits attached to the complaint include a copy of a certificate Migden received from St. Peter’s commending her for her dedication to the practice and her many years of service.

As patient care deteriorated because staff was not replaced — Migden herself had no power to hire staff — the complaint describes one staff member sobbing in the hallways, telling Migden, “I can’t take this — the patients are angry at us — this is not fair to the patients.” Migden’s requests for more staff went unheeded, the complaint says.

The landlord of the rented office space visited in mid-June, the complaint says, and took pictures, he said, because the space was to be rented at the end of the month.

The letter Migden was given on July 5, the complaint says, did not name “the specific conduct that resulted in her termination.”  It goes on, “Contrary to what is asserted in the July 5, 2016 letter, Dr. Migden has never engaged in any inappropriate behavior toward the Practice staff. The implication that Dr. Migden was difficult to work with and caused staff turnover was a blatant falsehood.”

Further, the complaint says that St. Peter’s representatives “falsely state there was good cause to terminate Dr. Migden’s employment and that Dr. Migden was given advance notice of the conduct that she was required to correct, but failed to take appropriate action.” To illustrate that point, the Enterprise July 21, 2016 article quoting St. Peter’s spokesman Streeter is included as an exhibit.

“A lot to offer”

Asked why she wants a trial, Migden told The Enterprise, “I feel a jury of my peers would certainly recognize the grave injustice…Now in my late 60s to be suddenly without a practice, I was wondering if I’d ever be employable again…Physicians were told to have nothing to do with me, colleagues of mine for 30 years…To this day, people say they thought I committed a fraud.”

She went on about the humiliation of being escorted out of her office in front of patients. A patient she saw this week, in the practice with Oldendorf and another doctor, told Migden she had heard Migden was fired because she was opposed to electronic records.

“That’s the ultimate irony,” said Migden. One of the reasons she signed on with St. Peter’s, she said, was to get electronic records; they were promised but never provided.

Lisa Carr, the medical records clerk in Migden’s office for seven years, starting in 2009, told The Enterprise last July, after Migden was fired, that one of the reasons Migden signed on with St. Peter’s, giving up her solo practice, was because of new legal requirements for electronic medical records, Carr said, a transition she termed “very expensive.”

“They gave me a scanner that sat on my desk and got dusty,” said Carr. “They never followed through. It was empty promises.” The paper records took up so much space she was asked to set up an inventory control system so that the records could be stored in a facility out of the office. She set up a searchable excel spreadsheet, stored on a flash drive, and printed out the data on paper; the barcodes were noted so files could be found in stored boxes.

Carr said she urged that the data instead be stored safely in a cloud. “If anybody ever lost that flash drive,” she said, access to the records would be lost as well. “When I left, it was still there, tucked in the back of a binder. They never cared.”

Before Migden signed on with St. Peter’s Carr said, “We had a really great team going. They did what they could to destroy it.”

“They never intended to keep the practice,” said Migden this week of St. Peter’s. “They didn’t even repair the TV in the waiting room. They had a plan to acquire several practices with older physicians, to get rid of the physician and the office, and they now own the patients.”

She concluded of her suit, “This isn’t about the money…You can’t even attach monetary value. This is about being forced out of my career… I just re-boarded,” she said, having gotten news this week she passed the strenuous exam. “I have a lot to offer.”