Med Board Fines Doc $5,000 And Suspends Physician Assistant License

The state Medical Examining Board issued a $5,000 fine and a reprimand to an orthopedic surgeon who operated on the wrong knee of a patient in 2018 and temporarily suspended the medical license of a Colchester physician assistant who is accused of falsifying documents and excessively using alcohol and marijuana. Dr. Christopher Betz, who works at Starling Physicians, failed to follow the pre-incision protocol and failed to independently verify which knee was the site of the operation prior a procedure that took place at Bristol Hospital on Sept. 14, 2018, according to state Department of Public Health (DPH) documents. The error wasn’t reported by DPH’s Facility Licensing and Investigations Section (FLIS) to its Practitioner Licensing and Investigations Unit, which investigates complaints against physicians, for the board until July 19, 2019 after Bristol Hospital was the subject of an unannounced inspection by federal health authorities, documents said. Bristol Health reported the medical error as an adverse event on Sept.