$2.25 Million Settlement After a Metro Atlanta OB Practice Missed a Young Mother’s Fatal Heart Condition
A 23-year-old expectant mother died less than two weeks before her due date from a heart condition her prenatal chart never worked up. She had received care at a Metro Atlanta OB practice staffed by physicians and certified nurse midwives from February through September of 2023. At the very first visit, she disclosed a family history of cardiac disease and a maternal high-risk pregnancy history. Seven months of visits followed.
On September 2, 2023, she collapsed at home. She went into full cardiac arrest, was transported to Piedmont Atlanta Hospital, and could not be revived. Her unborn daughter died with her. The Fulton County Medical Examiner concluded that the cause of death was dilated cardiomyopathy. A wrongful-death suit was filed on September 12, 2024 in the State Court of DeKalb County against the supervising physician, the certified nurse midwives, and the corporate entities that ran the practice. The matter resolved for a low seven-figure sum before trial. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes.
What the prenatal record showed, and what it did not
A prenatal intake sheet is supposed to capture the pieces of a patient’s history that shape the pregnancy in front of you. Family cardiac history is one of those pieces. Maternal high-risk history is another. Height and BMI are two more. In this record, the first two were disclosed on day one. The last two were never written down.
Across seven months of visits, the chart reflected the following:
- A disclosed family history of cardiac disease at intake
- A disclosed maternal high-risk pregnancy history at intake
- No cardiovascular testing ordered at any point
- No referral to a cardiologist
- No referral to a maternal-fetal medicine specialist
- No height and no BMI recorded
The affidavits filed with the complaint alleged that these gaps fell below the accepted standard of care for a pregnant patient who had disclosed cardiac risk at her first visit. What the record showed was a chart that captured a risk on day one and then behaved, month after month, as if the risk had never been captured at all. That is the case in one sentence. Everything else is mechanism.
How dilated cardiomyopathy hides during pregnancy
Dilated cardiomyopathy is an enlarged, weakened heart muscle that pumps less blood with each beat. In a pregnant patient, its early signs look ordinary. Breathlessness on stairs. Fatigue that feels like third-trimester fatigue. Swelling in the ankles. A patient who mentions any of these at a prenatal visit is describing symptoms that a lot of pregnant patients describe, which is precisely why the diagnosis gets missed when the intake history is not doing its job.
The workup itself is not exotic. An echocardiogram shows the size and function of the heart. An EKG shows the rhythm. A BNP blood test shows whether the heart muscle is under strain. These are what a reasonably careful provider considers when a patient presents with cardiac risk factors and any suggestive symptom. None of them requires a hospital admission. All of them require someone to order them.
The scale of the problem sits in the medical literature. A 2024 review in JACC: Advances of 210 pregnancy-related cardiovascular deaths across 32 states found that roughly three-quarters were deemed preventable. Cardiomyopathy accounted for 40 percent of those deaths. The peripartum subtype, which arises in late pregnancy or the months after delivery, made up more than half of the cardiomyopathy cases in that review. The record in this matter reflected antepartum disease, meaning the heart muscle was failing before delivery, not after.
The referrals that never happened
For a pregnant patient with disclosed cardiac risk, the standard route is co-management by maternal-fetal medicine and cardiology. A referral generates the workup. It generates risk stratification, a delivery plan, a monitoring schedule, and, when the case warrants, what some centers now call a Pregnancy Heart Team. None of that begins until the referral leaves the office.
The load-bearing failure in cases like this one is usually not the initial screening. Many providers ask the right question at intake. The failure is the step after the answer. The family history was on the chart. The high-risk history was on the chart. Neither referral was made. Seven months went by. When the referral that would have generated the diagnostic workup is the referral no one sent, the diagnosis is the diagnosis no one made.
When the care team is a physician, certified nurse midwives, and a practice group
Prenatal care in a group practice passes through multiple hands. A patient may see a physician at one visit and a certified nurse midwife at the next. Notes accumulate in a shared chart. Standing orders come from a supervising physician. In Georgia, certified nurse midwives practice under physician supervision, and the practice group that employs both carries its own exposure for how the care was organized and delivered. Liability in this kind of case depends on contracts and facts.
The complaint filed in the State Court of DeKalb County on September 12, 2024 named the supervising physician, the certified nurse midwives who saw the patient during her prenatal course, and the corporate entities that owned the practice. Georgia’s expert affidavit rule, O.C.G.A. 9-11-9.1, requires a plaintiff in a medical malpractice case to file, with the complaint, an affidavit from an expert who practices or teaches in the same specialty as the defendant. When the defendants include both a physician and certified nurse midwives, one affidavit does not do the work of two.
The affidavits in this matter came from a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist and a certified nurse midwife. That is not the usual posture in a medical malpractice complaint. Most cases name one qualified expert in one specialty. Here the pleading required two, because the care team was two. The matter resolved for just over $2 million before trial, and, again, past results do not guarantee future outcomes.
What Georgia law calls the loss of a young mother and her unborn daughter
Georgia measures wrongful death by the “full value of the life” of the person lost, which includes both the economic value of what the person would have earned and produced and the intangible value of the life itself. O.C.G.A. 51-4-2 sets the filing hierarchy: the surviving spouse holds the claim first, then the surviving children, then the parents. When there is no surviving spouse or child, the claim moves down the ladder. The death of an unborn child is a separate legal question tied to viability, and the analysis in a case that involves both a maternal death and a fetal death runs on two tracks at once. For the practice-area context on how these claims are structured in Georgia, our wrongful death page walks through the standing and damages framework in more depth.
Georgia’s two-year deadline, and the wall five years out
Georgia’s medical malpractice statute of limitations, O.C.G.A. 9-3-71, is generally two years from the date of injury, with a five-year statute of repose as the outer wall. Exceptions can apply, and the deadline for a wrongful-death claim can turn on facts a family does not yet have, including the date of death, the timing of an autopsy finding, and the circumstances of discovery. The safe move is a prompt records review rather than an assumption about the clock. Our page on the Georgia statute of limitations lays out how those dates interact.
Questions Georgia families ask after a pregnancy-related death
The questions below are the ones we hear most often from families whose facts look like this one. None of the answers is legal or medical advice.
What is the most common cause of maternal death in the United States?
Cardiovascular and cardiac conditions are the leading category in recent CDC and JACC reviews of pregnancy-related deaths. Within that category, cardiomyopathy is the single largest subtype, and other cardiovascular causes, including hypertensive heart disease, coronary events, arrhythmias, and aortic dissection, make up the balance.
What are the leading causes of maternal mortality in Georgia?
The Georgia Maternal Mortality Review Committee has identified hemorrhage, mental health conditions, cardiomyopathy, cardiovascular and coronary conditions, embolism, and preeclampsia and eclampsia as leading causes in its most recent published cycles. Nearly all of the deaths in those categories were deemed preventable by the review team. The committee’s reports are published by the Georgia Department of Public Health.
Can you have a healthy pregnancy with cardiomyopathy?
Many patients with known cardiac disease carry pregnancies with co-management by maternal-fetal medicine and cardiology. The decisions about a specific pregnancy belong with the patient’s treating team, not a webpage.
What are the cardiac causes of maternal death?
Cardiomyopathy, including peripartum cardiomyopathy, is the largest single category. The others include hypertensive heart disease, coronary events such as spontaneous coronary artery dissection, arrhythmias, valvular disease, and aortic dissection.
What does “preventable” mean when a review committee uses it?
It means the review team concluded, on the records, that a change in patient, provider, facility, system, or community factors could reasonably have changed the outcome. It is a public-health finding, not a legal finding of negligence.
How long does a family have to file a claim in Georgia?
Generally two years from the date of injury under O.C.G.A. 9-3-71, with a five-year outer limit and exceptions that can apply. A prompt conversation with a lawyer is safer than a guess about the clock.
If your family lost a mother or a baby to something no one worked up
What we do in a case like this is read the chart. We pull the prenatal record, the intake sheet, the visit notes, and the autopsy, and we give them to qualified experts who have no relationship with the practice involved. If the record shows a risk that was captured and acted on, we say so. If it shows a risk that was captured and never acted on, that is a different conversation.
Davis Adams handles medical malpractice cases in Georgia on a contingency-fee basis; terms and expenses are outlined in the fee agreement. If the chart is sitting in a drawer and you want a set of trained eyes on it, we are here to talk.
This article is for general informational purposes only and is not legal advice. Every case depends on its own facts, medical records, and expert review. Reading this page does not create an attorney-client relationship.
