Pa. Superior Court ruled that a patient waiver restricting where doctor can be sued is valid

A patient at a Bucks County pain management office signed a waiver just before getting a spinal implant in October 2021 saying she would only sue in that county if anything went wrong.

After the surgery went badly and the woman was paralyzed from the chest down, she filed a medical malpractice lawsuit in Philadelphia.

That doesn’t fly, according to a state appeals court.

In a precedential decision last week, Pennsylvania Superior Court backed a trial court order transferring the case to Doylestown. The appellate court said the waiver — which counts as a contract — trumped civil procedure rules that would have allowed the case to be heard in Philadelphia.

The ruling is important following a rule change at the beginning of 2023 that allowed more cases to be filed in the city rather than the county where the incident occurred. The decision could lead more suburban healthcare providers to use patient waivers that keep malpractice lawsuits out of Philadelphia, where juries sometimes grant huge verdicts.

The lawyer who filed the lawsuit in Philadelphia, Thomas W. Sheridan, called the Superior Court decision significant and said it points to an issue that will likely need to be resolved by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

“It’s important for people who are injured to knowingly waive their rights, and I don’t think that happened in this case,” Sheridan said.

“In this case, the patient had visited this doctor numerous times before he operated on her spinal cord,” he said, “and at no time before that procedure was there any discussion about limiting her right to choose where she could bring a lawsuit.”

Sheridan said Sunday that he and his client had not yet decided whether to appeal to the state’s highest court.

Before the surgery, the woman signed a one-page form with eight paragraphs of text. Under the seventh paragraph, there was a place to put her initials objecting to the restriction on where she could sue. She left that space blank.

It’s not clear from the Superior Court decision whether the doctor would have performed the procedure anyway, even if she had signaled her objection to the Bucks County restriction.

Curt Schroder, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition for Civil Justice Reform, a Harrisburg trade group that favors restrictions on where lawsuits can be filed, said the decision was a confirmation of contractual law over procedural rules.

“Today we see more and more contractual venue provisions contained in medical documents. This case verifies their enforceability,” he said.

Staff writer Abraham Gutman contributed to this article.