Stony Brook Heart Center in dispute with ex-chief

Five years after a prominent heart doctor was recruited to be chief of cardiology and co-director of Stony Brook University's Heart Center, he's out.

He said he was fired.

The medical school dean said he resigned.

In a Feb. 7 e-mail to colleagues, Dr. David Brown said that two days earlier Dr. Richard Fine, medical school dean, had told him he was being removed from both posts.

"He refused to give a reason and in violation of all principles of due process, claimed he did not have to," Brown said in the e-mail.

Stony Brook spokeswoman Lauren Sheprow declined to comment, saying "the university does not discuss personnel issues."

Brown, 55, who remains on the faculty, also declined to comment.

In his e-mail, the cardiologist warned that the dean would say Brown had quit of his own accord: " . . . but please be assured there was nothing voluntary about this process," he said.

The next day Fine sent an e-mail to all faculty saying that "Dr. David Brown informed me that he wished to resign from his roles in both positions effective immediately."

Brown suggested he had been dismissed because he had been critical of the hospital.

"It is highly likely that this is ultimately related to my refusal to cooperate with the hospital on certain initiatives in a way that would threaten our academic mission and/or my vocal concern about the quality of certain clinical services . . . ," he said in the e-mail.

But Sheprow noted that "all latest available data . . . speak to the quality of our heart services." She said that the University HealthSystem Consortium, which includes 90 percent of the country's nonprofit academic medical centers, "identified Stony Brook as number three among 98 U.S. academic medical centers for overall cardiothoracic surgical mortality."

In a 2006 news release on a study Brown had published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Stony Brook praised Brown's "national reputation as a clinician, an innovator, a researcher and an educator."

He came to Stony Brook from Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan in November 2004, at a time of controversy within the cardiac program.

That same year, Dr. Irvin Krukenkamp, who had been chief of cardiothoracic surgery and director of the Heart Center, filed suit against Stony Brook. He charged that the hospital had tried to fire him when he raised red flags about the care of an infant who died after surgery in the pediatric cardiac surgery program.

The next year, Krukenkamp received a $3.3 million settlement from the university. In 2006, the state closed the pediatric cardiac surgery program.