Panel restricts license of doctor who had high-profile fight with University of Kentucky
A state regulatory board has restricted the license of a Lexington surgeon who was involved in a high-profile controversy at the University of Kentucky.
The order limits Dr. Paul A. Kearney to prescribing controlled substances only immediately before, during or seven days after a major surgery on a patient.
The Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure (KBML) released the order Friday after finding that Kearney committed violations that included prescribing drugs to people without checking their history in a state monitoring system.
One use of the system, called Kentucky All Schedule Prescription Electronic Reporting, or KASPER, is for doctors to make sure patients aren’t getting multiple prescriptions from different providers.
The order requires Kearney unconditionally pass an ethics course, complete a prescribing course through Vanderbilt University and pay $12,485 to cover the cost of the investigation by the licensing board.
Kearney taught, practiced and conducted research at UK for 31 years before retiring in October 2019 and going into private practice, according to the KBML order.
Kearney also is active in a program called Surgery on Sunday, which provides services to indigent and undocumented people, the order said.
Kearney was a respected physician at UK, winning teaching awards and national recognition for trauma work.
However, he also was accused of being verbally abusive to students, staff members and patients, allegedly calling one quadriplegic patient a “f---ing idiot,” for instance.
The university stripped Kearney of his clinical privileges in 2015.
Kearney charged that UK retaliated against him because he had questioned financial practices at UK Healthcare, but the university denied that.
Kearney remained a professor after losing his clinical privileges and colleagues later elected him to a faculty leadership position.
The licensure board said it started investigating Kearney after a pharmacist refused to fill a prescription he had written for a patient and reported a concern to state authorities.
The board filed a complaint earlier this year with a number of allegations against Kearney.
They included writing prescriptions for himself and his wife between January 2016 and November 2018; writing prescriptions such as pain pills and anti-anxiety medication for nine people without running KASPER reports as required; not keeping records on those people; and running a KASPER report on his sister-in-law even though she was not his patient, which isn’t allowed.
Kearney said in his defense that he never knowingly violated any standard of acceptable practice, and that while there may have been some technical violations, he had committed no misconduct.
Kearney said he wrote a prescription for himself out of convenience after the doctor who had initially written it retired, and that he wasn’t aware doing so ran afoul of any rule, in part because the pharmacy never told him.
Kearney said he didn’t maintain records on some people for whom he wrote prescriptions because he knew most of them well and because he only wrote prescriptions for them once, or that his treatment of them was limited, according to the KBML order.
And he said he ran a KASPER report to see what drugs his sister-in-law was getting out of concern that she was abusing drugs while taking care of her mother, according to the board order.
The board said there was no evidence Kearney’s concern about his sister-in-law was misplaced or not justified, but that it was still a violation because she was not his patient and because his inquiry was not a formal investigation.
Doctors can prescribe to themselves or family members in limited circumstances, but Kearney’s prescriptions to himself and his wife didn’t fall within those exceptions, and Kearney should have known that, the licensure board said.
The board also said records didn’t back Kearney’s response that he had only a very limited prescribing history with some patients at issue.
In one case, for instance, Kearney indicated he wrote one non-refillable prescription for a woman, when KASPER reports showed he actually wrote a number of prescriptions over two years, according to the order released Friday.
In another case, Kearney said he wrote a prescription for an anti-anxiety medication to a person once or twice, when records showed he routinely wrote the person prescriptions for 18 months without creating a record of the treatment, the licensure board said.
