Whether a hospital can falsely report a physician's employment status to state and federal authorities in violation of contractual bylaws and due process protections

No question identified. : In the Supreme Court of the United States Bharani Padmanabhan MD PhD v. Cambridge Health Alliance PETITIONER’S APPLICATION TO EXTEND TIME TO FILE A PETITION FOR A WRIT OF CERTIORARI To Circuit Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson: Petitioner Dr. Bharani Padmanabhan respectfully requests that the time to file a Petition for a Writ of Certiorari in this matter be extended for sixty days, up to and including February 15, 2024. On September 18, 2023, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court denied a motion for reconsideration. Docket report enclosed. Absent an extension of time, the Petition would be due on December 17, 2023. This Court has jurisdiction over this Application under 28 U.S.C. 1257, and Rule 10(b), and has authority to grant the requested relief under 28 U.S.C. 1651. BACKGROUND In 1995, Dr. Bharani Padmanabhan graduated summa cum laude at 25 after concurrently completing his MD and PhD (multiple sclerosis) degrees. In 2000, he completed his residency in neurology at Tufts, and followed that with three years of fellowship training in neuroimmunology at the Weiner Lab at Harvard’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital (where he was the first to identify CXCR6/CXCLI6 as the most important markers for inflammation in multiple sclerosis), and an additional year at the MS Clinic at the University of Massachusetts. In 2004 he began the MS Service at a private neurology practice in Southern Massachusetts, where he cared for 751 MS patients by himself. In 2007, he was recruited to the neurology division at Cambridge Health Alliance in Everett, Massachusetts, a public safety-net hospital system that serves indigent and undocumented patients. In 2008, petitioner conducted a prospective study directed by his neurology chief, Dr. Thomas Harter Glick, Professor of Neurology at Harvard, to quantify the prevalence of medical errors in reports for brain MRI scans issued by the radiology department. They found that a majority of CHA’s brain MRI scan reports had little or no correlation with the images of the scans themselves, and that the reports correlated almost exclusively with the patient’s age, meaning the reports were generated blindly and generically. Many important findings on the images went unmentioned in the reports, including strokes, contrast-enhancing brain tumors, HIV and multiple sclerosis lesions. Dr. Glick gently brought this to the attention of radiology chief Dr. Carol Hulka and sought a collegial meeting to discuss a quality improvement plan to reduce medical errors. At the time, Dr. Glick was unaware that the federal government had already threatened Dr. Hulka with daily monetary fines and exclusion from Medicare/Medicaid because she had performed mammograms on hundreds of women without calibrating the machine every morning, meaning the scan reports were worthless. Worse, none of the women were brought back for rescanning so we have no idea how many breast cancers were missed at an early stage. Within a year of informing Dr. Hulka of massive medical errors, Dr. Glick was forced to retire, CHA then ‘summarily’ suspended Dr. Padmanabhan’s membership of the medical staff on November 9, 2010 (but did not implement it for another 48 hours during which he treated another 30 patients) and perp-walked him out on November 11, 2010. The charge was that Dr. Padmanabhan did not know how to diagnose and treat multiple sclerosis or treat chronic pain. This triggered the binding contract (Bylaws and Fair Hearing Plan) that governs the relationship between a physician, the medical staff, and the hospital, and allows only one Fair Hearing per suspension. Dr. Padmanabhan prevailed at CHA’s January 2011 Fair Hearing. In February 2011, the Fair Hearing panel ruled that there was no credible evidence to terminate Dr, Padmanabhan’s membership of the medical staff or his employment at CHA. Because Dr. Padmanabhan won, CHA ignored this report in breach of the binding contract and sought a doover with different panel members.