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EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act) requires hospitals to screen and stabilize emergency patients before discharge, regardless of ability to pay. Wrongful discharge occurs when hospitals release patients before conditions are stabilized. Louisiana patients have one year to file claims through the Medical Review Panel.
You had a medical crisis. You went to the Emergency Room (ER) because you knew something was seriously wrong.
They ran some tests, spent maybe an hour or two with you, and a doctor eventually told you, “You’re stable. Go home and follow up with your primary care doctor.”
Then, within hours or a day later, your condition got catastrophically worse. Maybe you were readmitted to a different hospital, required emergency surgery, or worse—a loved one passed away.
The first feeling is often confusion: How could the ER miss something that serious? The second feeling is betrayal: Did the hospital just want me gone?
You may be right to question that decision. When a hospital discharges a patient too soon, or when that discharge is based on an inadequate evaluation, the consequences are life-altering. In these cases, the hospital failed its legal duty.
The reality is that “stable” in the ER means “you probably won’t die on the property right now.” It does not mean “you are healthy enough to be safe without monitoring.” The gap between those two definitions is where your case for negligence—and an EMTALA violation—exists.
The law that governs this situation is the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA).
EMTALA is a federal law, 42 U.S.C. § 1395dd, that applies to almost every hospital in Louisiana, Texas, and elsewhere because most accept Medicare funding. It was created in 1986 to prevent “patient dumping”—when hospitals turned away sick or injured patients who could not afford the high cost of medical bills.
Under EMTALA, the hospital has two non-negotiable federal legal duties the moment you walk through the door:
The hospital must provide an adequate screening exam to determine if an Emergency Medical Condition (EMC) exists.
If the screening (MSE) determines you have an Emergency Medical Condition (EMC), the hospital is then obligated to provide treatment until the condition is Stabilized before discharge or transfer.
When a premature discharge leads to a catastrophic injury or death, the case usually involves two distinct, but related, legal claims: a state medical malpractice claim and a federal EMTALA violation claim.
This happens when the hospital failed to meet the Standard of Care during your initial check-up.
This happens when the hospital knew or should have known you were unstable but pushed you out anyway.
This is the hardest part of any wrongful discharge lawsuit: connecting the discharge decision to the tragedy that followed.
The hospital’s defense will argue: “The patient’s underlying disease was severe, and the complication (e.g., the stroke, the rupture) would have happened anyway, regardless of our discharge decision.”
To win, we must prove that the loss of critical time—the time you should have spent under observation or receiving treatment—directly led to the catastrophic injury. We must prove that if the hospital had fulfilled its duty and held you for two more hours, the outcome would have been significantly better.
If you or a loved one suffered a catastrophic decline after being discharged from the ER, you must act now.
Your priority is your health. Get treatment elsewhere immediately. Do not return to the facility that failed you.
Write down the names of the ER doctors/nurses, the time you were admitted and discharged, and the exact symptoms you complained about before you were released. Your personal notes are powerful evidence of what the hospital missed.
Keep the paper copy of your discharge instructions. This document is a core piece of evidence, detailing what the doctor thought they ruled out. You must also follow those instructions. If they told you to see your primary care physician or a specialist the next day, and you failed to do so, the hospital will use that fact to blame you for your own injury.
Wrongful discharge cases are complex. They are the blending of federal law (EMTALA) and state malpractice claims (Standard of Care). You need a lawyer who understands the intricacies of the EMTALA stabilization rule and how to navigate the Louisiana Medical Review Panel process.
The interplay between EMTALA and Louisiana Medical Malpractice is tricky and fact-specific. EMTALA claims arise under federal law under specific circumstances, and claims arising under EMTALA must be filed in federal court.
If you have EMTALA claims for failure to stabilize, failure to appropriately transfer, or patient dumping, you will almost certainly have claims arising under the Louisiana Medical Malpractice Act (LMMA). This is a critical distinction that general personal injury lawyers often miss, and you should consult a medical malpractice lawyer to tease out the details.
Essentially, you may have two separate simultaneous cases:
This intersection also affects the maximum recovery:
Further, the prescriptive periods (statute of limitations) are different for medical malpractice claims in Louisiana than they are for federal EMTALA claims. Medical malpractice prescription in Louisiana is generally 1 year from the date of the medical malpractice or 1 year from the date you knew or should have known of the malpractice, up to 3 years. The statute of limitations for federal EMTALA claims is 2 years.
Often, Louisiana medical malpractice lawyers will file the medical malpractice claim and initiate discovery to find evidence of and support for potential federal EMTALA violations.
This complex relationship is why specialists are best suited to help maximize your recovery while navigating both federal and state legal hurdles.
The hospital will immediately begin preparing its defense the moment the wrongful discharge is noticed. They have a paper trail to cover. Your lawyer’s primary job is to aggressively seize the key documents that prove the violation. We don’t rely solely on what the doctor wrote in the chart.
We look for procedural red flags:
Contact the Ikerd Law Firm today for a free, confidential case review. We will investigate whether your wrongful discharge was an EMTALA violation and the direct cause of your serious injury.
You generally have one year from the date of the wrongful discharge (or from the date you discovered the injury) to file a claim with the Louisiana Medical Review Panel (MRP). However, this one-year period is absolute. Because of the complexity and the need to investigate, do not wait past the first few months to contact an attorney.
No. EMTALA guarantees your right to a proper screening and stabilizing treatment, regardless of your ability to pay. However, it does not guarantee free care. You will still be billed for the services you received. EMTALA creates a federal right to sue for damages if the hospital illegally fails its duty, leading to injury.
No. EMTALA only allows patients to sue the hospital itself for damages resulting from a violation. However, the doctor who made the negligent discharge decision can still be sued for Medical Malpractice under Louisiana state law, especially when the claim clears the Medical Review Panel. Your attorney needs to pursue both angles.
This strengthens your case. If you followed the discharge instructions but still suffered a catastrophic decline, it is powerful proof that the original diagnosis and discharge decision may have been fundamentally flawed and negligent.
Yes. In addition to a patient’s private lawsuit for damages, the federal government (through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services or CMS) can investigate and impose civil monetary penalties (fines) against the hospital and the discharging physician for EMTALA violations. This federal finding can be powerful leverage in your civil case.
Yes, possibly. EMTALA has strict rules about appropriate transfers. If you were unstable, the transferring hospital must have either stabilized you first or proven that the medical benefits of the transfer outweighed the risks. An inappropriate, hurried transfer of an unstable patient is a clear EMTALA violation.
It depends on who owns the clinic. Hospital-owned urgent care centers are generally subject to EMTALA because CMS considers the words “urgent” and “emergency” virtually synonymous to patients seeking care.
Yes. Suicidal thoughts, homicidal ideation, and acute psychosis qualify as emergency medical conditions under EMTALA when they pose an immediate danger to the patient or others.
Possibly, but it depends on what you were told. Signing an AMA form does not automatically bar your EMTALA claim if the hospital failed to inform you of specific risks.
Yes. Louisiana law allows surviving family members to bring wrongful death claims for EMTALA violations that result in death.
No. Being short-staffed or overwhelmed does not excuse a hospital from its EMTALA obligations to screen and stabilize patients.
No. EMTALA only applies to hospitals that participate in the Medicare program and have emergency departments.
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