White Plains Hospital Malpractice Lawyer

With our primary office in Westchester County, we have extensive litigation experience in the Westchester courts, and specific experience litigating cases involving White Plains Hospital.

White Plains Hospital’s Place in Westchester Healthcare

White Plains Hospital is in the “middle ground” in terms of size and sophistication among Westchester County hospitals.

It is not a small “community hospital” nor a large medical center. But White Plains Hospital does hold itself out as a specialized facility in a number of areas — and we will hold them to the standards of their own marketing.

Notably, the hospital now publicizes its “heart failure clinic” and surgical programs as state-of-the-art. Since 2015, White Plains Hospital has also been formally affiliated with the Montefiore Health System (Becker’s Hospital Review). Given its advertising and Montefiore affiliation, we believe White Plains Hospital should be held to the legal standard of care of a sophisticated hospital, providing specialty services in a number of areas.

The hospital has also aggressively expanded into primary and outpatient care, particularly in the New Rochelle area, through White Plains Hospital Physician Associates (WPHPA).

WPH now operates more than 30 outpatient locations across Westchester and the Hudson Valley. Part of our investigative work is to determine what entity may be responsible for a failure of care. And we look to whether communications and coordination of care among entities properly took place — for example, whether test results, referrals, and follow-up recommendations actually reached the providers who needed them.

Insights From Our Litigation Experience With White Plains Hospital

Litigating against area hospitals, including White Plains Hospital, provides us with insight into how these institutions function, which can also help us know where to look for evidence.

For example, over the past few years, White Plains Hospital moved its clinical documentation onto the “Epic” electronic medical record (EMR) system. This is a robust electronic records system and can include both regular notes and “messaging” features. We have familiarity with how Epic structures physician notes and inter-provider messaging, which can help us identify when to look for evidence of key communications that may have affected patient care. We also have institutional knowledge as to how to conduct an “audit trail” of Epic-based systems, which can help reveal when an entry was created, viewed, or edited after the fact.

Coordination of Care and Common Malpractice Areas

White Plains Hospital opened a “Center for Advanced Medicine and Surgery” (also known as “CAMS”) in 2021. CAMS operates as a large outpatient surgery, endoscopy, and imaging facility. It is technically given a separate mailing address on Maple Avenue but is also physically connected to the main hospital campus.

CAMS appears to function as an outpatient adjunct of the main hospital, and this should include access to post-operative services when needed. That said, we have seen instances where coordination of care between the CAMS facility and the main hospital campus appears to have fallen short. Any failure to coordinate in healthcare can create grave harm or even death — for example, if physicians at the main hospital do not respond to requests for more specialized evaluation, or if there are poor “hand-offs” from surgical to post-surgical teams.

System or institutional failures, in addition to individual malpractice, are what we look for in evaluating care at entities of this type. The same kind of gap can occur between an outpatient office and a hospital itself.

Coordination gaps — e.g., between CAMS, WPHPA, and the main hospital campus — are patterns we look for closely at any hospital, and at White Plains Hospital in particular given its multi-faceted development into outpatient and surgical center practices. Of note, coordination failures can also occur in the emergency department setting. See our pages on emergency room malpractice. And apart from coordination of care, errors in diagnosis can occur in any healthcare setting. See our pages on diagnosis errors.

How We Investigate Cases at White Plains Hospital, and Elsewhere

We interview the patient, or family members, to get a first-hand account of what happened and when — this often fills gaps that the written record leaves out. If the case involved an emergency, we also obtain records from EMS/911, since the ambulance record can show an earlier arrival or symptom-onset time than what the hospital later documented. We then obtain the complete medical record from White Plains Hospital, including nursing notes, physician notes, laboratory and imaging results, and, for surgical cases, operative and anesthesia records.

Once we have the records, we retain board-certified physician experts in the relevant specialty to compare the care given against accepted standards of medical practice. Per New York Pattern Jury Instruction 2:150, medical malpractice under New York law is a “deviation” or “departure” from accepted standards of medical practice that proximately causes injury. We reconstruct the timeline of events — when symptoms began, when tests resulted, when specialists were consulted, and when treatment was actually given — because a delay at any point can be decisive. Our physician experts testify to a reasonable degree of medical likelihood — New York does not require any particular form of words, only an opinion signifying a probability supported by a rational basis (see Matott v. Ward, 48 N.Y.2d 455, 459-461 (1979)) — on whether the delay diminished the patient’s chance of a better outcome or increased the injury (Goldberg v. Horowitz, 73 A.D.3d 691 (2d Dep’t 2010)).

Separately, New York law also recognizes a distinct claim for lack of informed consent under Public Health Law § 2805-d — generally limited to non-emergency treatment or an invasive diagnostic procedure — which we evaluate independently from the standard-of-care question.

Part of our early work is also identifying who actually employed each provider. Many physicians who treat at a private hospital are not its employees — under New York law, a hospital is not automatically responsible for the malpractice of a private attending physician the patient retained independently (Hill v. St. Clare’s Hosp., 67 N.Y.2d 72 (1986)). That is not the end of the analysis: a hospital can still be answerable where the patient came to the hospital itself for care rather than to a doctor they had chosen — the usual emergency-department situation — or where the hospital held the physician out as its own. We determine this early, since it decides whether a claim runs against the hospital, the physician’s own practice or WPHPA, or both.

Concerns That Suggest You May Need Advice On Possible Medical Malpractice

These circumstances do not by themselves mean malpractice occurred, but if you experienced any of them and suffered a serious injury, or a loved one died, the situation warrants evaluation.

Compensation and Damages Available

When care falls short and causes a serious injury, New York law allows recovery for both out-of-pocket losses and the broader human cost of the harm — though a wrongful-death claim is measured differently than a standard malpractice claim.

Even for individuals who are not gainfully employed, the loss of the ability to engage in ordinary activities can support significant damages in a malpractice case. Retired patients, homemakers, and children can all recover non-economic damages without a wage-loss claim. Where future earning capacity is relevant, we also retain a vocational expert to quantify that loss.

For the full breakdown of what’s recoverable in each type of claim, see our pages on medical malpractice damages in New York and wrongful death claims.

Our Scarsdale and Midtown Offices

We have offices in Midtown New York City as well as in Scarsdale, Westchester County, to allow us to meet with clients where they work and live. Our Scarsdale office gives us regular, working familiarity with the Westchester County Supreme Court and the local medical institutions, including White Plains Hospital, which we draw on when investigating and litigating these cases.

Deadlines, Venue, and Exceptions

Cases against White Plains Hospital are typically filed in New York State Supreme Court, Westchester County (111 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, White Plains, NY 10601). The county where a case will be litigated (“venue”) may also be other counties, even if care took place in Westchester — a plaintiff is also permitted to file suit in their own county of residence (CPLR § 503(a)), and where a defendant is a professional corporation or partnership rather than an individual physician, that entity’s principal office can itself establish venue in a different county (CPLR § 503(c), (d)).

Malpractice Resulting in Death of a Patient

If a patient dies as a result of malpractice at White Plains Hospital, the estate’s personal representative can bring a wrongful death claim within two years of the date of death under EPTL § 5-4.1 — provided the underlying malpractice claim was itself still timely at the time of death.

Two separate “clocks” run in a death case: the malpractice claim, measured from malpractice events under CPLR § 214-a, and the wrongful-death claim, measured from the date of death under EPTL § 5-4.1. They can expire on different dates, and missing either one can compromise a case, even if the other is still open.

Several situations can change the standard two-year-and-six-month filing period under CPLR § 214-a, including ongoing treatment for the same condition, a foreign object left behind, a missed cancer diagnosis, or a minor patient. See our page on medical malpractice deadlines in Westchester County, or contact us directly, if one of these may apply to you.

Contact a Malpractice Attorney With Experience in White Plains Hospital Cases

Deadlines, the specific entity a claim runs against, and what a hospital’s own records and protocols show are the three questions that most often decide whether a White Plains Hospital case is worth pursuing — and each one is easier to get right the earlier we’re involved. If you believe you or a family member experienced substandard care at White Plains Hospital, its CAMS outpatient center, or a WPHPA practice, contact us to evaluate your case using our litigation experience against the hospital and the Westchester institutions it works with.