Former Ga. technician falsified mammograms
10 patients had cancerous lumps, tumors
PERRY, Ga. — Sharon Holmes found a lump in her left breast by accident. At work one day as a school custodian, her hand brushed her chest and she felt a knot sticking out. She was perplexed: Just three months earlier, she had been given an all-clear from her doctor.
A new mammogram in February 2010 showed she in fact had an aggressive stage 2 breast cancer. The horror of the discovery was compounded by the reason: The earlier test results she had gotten weren’t just read incorrectly. They were falsified.
She wasn’t alone. The lead radiological technologist at Perry Hospital in Perry, a town about 100 miles south of Atlanta, had for about 18 months been signing off on mammograms and spitting out reports showing nearly 1,300 women were clear of any signs of breast cancer or abnormalities.
Except that she was wrong. Holmes and nine other women were later shown to have lumps or cancerous tumors growing inside them.
Holmes, 49, said the discovery was horrific. She underwent successful surgery to remove the lump from her breast and followed that with chemotherapy and radiation.
Her breast has been cancer-free for four years and subsequent cancers found elsewhere, in her lymph nodes and thyroid, have been successfully treated.
The tech, Rachael Rapraeger, pleaded guilty earlier this month to 10 misdemeanor charges of reckless conduct and one felony charge of computer forgery. She was sentenced to serve up to six months in a detention center, to serve 10 years on probation during which she can’t work in the health care field and to pay a $12,500 fine.
Her reasons were vague. She told police she had personal issues that caused her to stop caring about her job, that she had fallen behind processing the piles of mammogram films. So she went into the hospital’s computer system, assumed the identities of physicians, and gave each patient a clear reading, an investigative report says. That allowed her to avoid the time-consuming paperwork required before the films are brought to a reading room for radiologists to examine, her lawyer, Floyd Buford, said.
Her actions were uncovered in April 2010 after a patient who’d received a negative report had another mammogram three months later at another hospital that revealed she had breast cancer. As hospital staff began to investigate, it was determined that the doctor whose name was on the faulty report had not been at the hospital the day the report was filed. Rapraeger confessed and was fired.