A Jonesboro cardiovascular surgeon is accusing a former colleague of waging a campaign to ruin his reputation and gather information for malpractice lawsuits against him.
Dr. Jay Bhama laid out those allegations in a defamation lawsuit against Dr. Lena Awar, an interventional cardiologist who once worked with Bhama. The suit also names attorneys who have created a website and social media posts seeking to locate Bhama’s patients for potential medical malpractice claims.
Neither Awar nor the attorneys being sued had filed their responses to Bhama’s lawsuit as of Tuesday afternoon.
While medical malpractice cases aren’t uncommon, Bhama’s suit constitutes a rare public case of a high-profile doctor questioning a colleague’s professional integrity.
Bhama and Awar worked at St. Bernards Healthcare in 2023 and 2024, until Awar left to join a competitor, NEA Baptist Memorial Hospital in Jonesboro, where she works in the cardiology department.
A few months after Awar left St. Bernards, Bhama alleges, a campaign began targeting him and his hospital.
That campaign included the creation of a website soliciting Bhama’s patients at St. Bernards for potential malpractice claims, the lawsuit says. The site directs patients to attorneys Marc Stewart of Little Rock and Michael Pierce of Houston, Texas, “to fight for those impacted by unnecessary surgery performed by Dr. Jay Bhama at St. Bernards Healthcare.”
Bhama’s lawsuit, filed Nov. 13 in Pulaski County Circuit Court, accused Awar of working with Stewart and Pierce “to manufacture baseless lawsuits” against him to damage his reputation and attempt to end his medical career.
Stewart and Pierce are representing Christal Hampton of Black Rock (Lawrence County) in a medical malpractice lawsuit against Bhama and St. Bernards. It was filed Oct. 3 in Craighead County Circuit Court. Bhama and St. Bernards have denied allegations of wrongdoing, and the case is pending.
Stewart told Arkansas Business via email last Monday that he had not been served with Bhama’s lawsuit and was going to hold off on making a comment about any of its specifics until he got advice from whatever attorney is assigned to him by his professional liability insurance carrier.
“I’ve been a medical malpractice-focused attorney since I was licensed in 1999, and I’ve never had a defamation case filed by a defendant in one [of] my cases before,” he said. “It’s very unusual.”
Pierce, who is a partner at Pierce Skrabanek PLLC, did not immediately respond to messages.
Awar also did not respond to a message from Arkansas Business.
St. Bernards referred questions to Bhama’s attorneys, John Tull and Houston Downes of Quattlebaum Grooms & Tull PLLC of Little Rock. Tull told Arkansas Business in a statement that “we can’t comment on pending litigation.”
Professional Dispute
Many of the assertions in Bhama’s lawsuit first appeared in documents at the Arkansas State Medical Board that Arkansas Business obtained through the state Freedom of Information Act.
One of Bhama’s patients, Amy Crawford of Walnut Ridge, filed a complaint against the cardiac surgeon with the board after she saw the website at the center of Bhama’s lawsuit and contacted the malpractice attorneys.
“Mr. Stewart told me that there was a whistleblower who reported that Dr. Bhama performed unnecessary procedures,” Crawford said in an Oct. 31 affidavit, filed as an exhibit to the lawsuit. “Mr. Stewart indicated that Dr. Bhama was performing these procedures for his monetary benefit.”
Crawford also said that Awar told her that she, Awar, was the whistleblower in the case.
Crawford said that the attorneys didn’t take her case. But she did file a complaint with the Medical Board in May.
Bhama denied the allegations of wrongdoing in Crawford’s case. “During my training and my near 20 years as [a] practicing physician and surgeon …, and having performed cardiac surgery on thousands of patients, patient safety and providing excellent patient care have always been, and continue to be, my highest priority,” Bhama wrote in his letter to the Medical Board.
The board, in a letter dated Aug. 20, determined that there wasn’t probable cause to bring charges against Bhama, and the case was closed.
After Crawford read Bhama’s response to the board, she said that she changed her opinion of his work.
“After Dr. Bhama’s explanation for the procedures to the medical board, I felt lied to and misled by Mr. Stewart, Mr. Pierce, and Dr. Awar,” Crawford said.
Bhama also said in the letter to the Medical Board that several St. Bernards employees told him that Awar left the hospital “‘dissatisfied’ or maybe even ‘disgruntled’ that her clinical outcomes had been called into question by the cardiology team leadership.”
Bhama’s letter also said that Awar felt she, rather than Bhama, should have been directing the Medical Center’s extracorporeal membrane oxygenation program, known as ECMO, in which blood is pumped outside of the body to a heart-lung machine.
Bhama had been recruited to St. Bernards in January 2023 as a cardiac surgeon to help develop its advanced heart surgery program. He led the development of ECMO and other programs in complex heart surgery.
Before Awar left the hospital she said to more than one employee that she was “going to end him” and “going to take him down,” in reference to Bhama, according to Bhama’s lawsuit.
Bhama is suing Stewart and Pierce for defamation, alleging they caused Bhama to suffer reputational harm among both current and potential patients.
In January, attorneys Pierce and Stewart published a website called stbernardsmalpractice.com that accused Bhama of performing “unnecessary and life-threatening procedures,” according to Bhama’s lawsuit.
The website said that at St. Bernards Healthcare “patients placed their health in the hands of what they thought was a trusted medical team. Instead, many were subjected to unnecessary and life-threatening procedures performed by Dr. Jay Bhama.”
Screenshots of the website and Facebook posts were included as exhibits as part of the lawsuit.
The website urged his former patients to contact the lawyers for a free consultation. “We know how devastating it is to realize you were betrayed by a surgeon you trusted,” the website said. “Having the right medical malpractice lawyer by your side can make all the difference.”
The website as it appeared Wednesday differed from the screenshots included as exhibits in the case by including the word “may” in the sentence: “Instead, many may have been subjected to unnecessary and life-threatening procedures performed by Dr. Jay Bhama.”
Bhama also is suing Awar for defamation for statements made to Bhama’s patients. Awar’s accusations of Bhama performing unnecessary surgeries or failing to obtain informed consent for patients “are categorically false,” his lawsuit said.
Bhama said in his letter to the Medical Board that Awar “never once communicated with me about any concerns regarding ‘unnecessary procedures’” being performed on patients. Bhama also is asking for an injunction to stop the attorneys and Awar from continuing to publish or represent that Bhama “performed unnecessary surgeries, failed to inform his patients of the care they would receive, or committed malpractice by performing primary procedures or secondary procedures.”
In addition, Bhama wants a “full and complete retraction to be published” by the defendants informing the public that the accusations made on the website, in social media posts, and directly to patients were completely false, the lawsuit said.
He is also seeking an unspecified amount in damages.
Coming to St. Bernards
Born in Detroit, Bhama received his medical degree from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in 1998.
After completing his formal training, Bhama practiced cardiac surgery and heart and lung transplants at academic medical centers between 2007 and 2019.
In 2019, Bhama was recruited to Baptist Health Medical Center in Little Rock to head its heart transplant and left ventricular assist device (LVAD) programs. In 2019, he also worked at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, where he was a surgery professor and helped with the development of its cardiac surgery, ECMO and LVAD programs.
Bhama is the only practicing adult cardiothoracic surgeon in Arkansas who is a member of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, an honor given to him for his academic and clinical achievements and contributions to the field of cardiothoracic surgery, the lawsuit said.
In January 2023, Bhama joined St. Bernards Medical Center. “Since my recruitment, we have successfully developed multiple programs allowing hundreds of patients in the northeast corner of the state to avoid having to leave the region to obtain advanced cardiac surgical care,” Bhama said in his letter to the board.
When Bhama arrived at St. Bernards, Awar had already been working there for about six months.
Born in Memphis, Awar grew up in Jonesboro. Her father, Dr. Ziad Awar, was a cardiologist at St. Bernards.
She earned her Doctor of Medicine from UAMS in 2014 and later practiced cardiology in southern California.
Awar joined the medical team at St. Bernards Heart & Vascular in 2022. “I’m so happy to be back home here in Jonesboro,” Awar said in a video posted on St. Bernards Medical Group’s Facebook page in July 2022. “I’m looking forward to being part of the community and practicing and meeting all of you here.”
Awar received praise from St. Bernards on LinkedIn in 2023 when it congratulated her for becoming the first woman doctor in the nation to complete a procedure using the “Impella RP Flex with SmartAssist, one of the world’s smallest heart pumps.”
On Oct. 17, 2024, NEA Baptist announced on its Facebook page that Awar had joined its cardiology team.
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