The Ohio Supreme Court has agreed that a medical malpractice lawsuit should be dismissed for failure to properly serve the complaint, despite the case having already been litigated for two years.
In an opinion issued Thursday in Ackman v. Mercy Health West Hospital, a majority of the court agreed to dismiss the medical malpractice and wrongful death suit against Dr. Muhammad Riaz Ahmad, a doctor employed by Mercy Hospital West in Cincinnati, finding that the physician had not been served with the complaint as required by the Ohio Rules of Civil Procedure. The administrator of a deceased woman’s estate, Jennifer Ackman, filed the lawsuit in February 2020, claiming Ahmad and the hospital failed to properly diagnose and treat Janet Sollman for a stroke, which led to her death in September 2019.