Background
Jennifer K. Collum-Glassman was hospitalized on March 25, 2017, for a fractured ankle and underwent surgery on March 30, 2017. She was discharged on April 19, 2017, and died on April 26, 2017, from a pulmonary embolism. Her estate, represented by executor Todd B. Glassman, brought a medical malpractice action alleging that defendant Anuradha Thalasila, M.D., an internist who treated the decedent during her hospitalization, negligently failed to administer pharmacologic prophylaxis against venous thromboembolism given the patient’s enhanced risk following her injury and surgery. The defendant held herself out in her pleadings as board-certified in internal medicine.
Plaintiff’s expert, Craig C. Hofmeister, M.D., was board-certified in both internal medicine (2002 to 2022) and hematology (2005, 2017 to present) and, at the time of the underlying events, served as an Associate Professor of Clinical Internal Medicine, Division of Hematology, at The Ohio State University. He certified that in 2016 through 2017, the majority of his professional time was spent as an internist diagnosing and treating patients across the full spectrum of internal medicine diseases — including hypertension, diabetes, and infectious diseases — in addition to providing focused hematology care. Defendant moved to bar Dr. Hofmeister from testifying on the standard of care under the New Jersey Medical Care Access and Responsibility and Patients First Act (PFA), N.J.S.A. 2A:53A-37 to -42, arguing that because he was primarily a hematologist rather than a general internist, he could not opine against an internist defendant. Following a Rule 104 hearing, the trial court agreed with the defendant, barring Dr. Hofmeister but declining to grant summary judgment and instead permitting plaintiff to retain a replacement expert.
The Court’s Holding
The Appellate Division reversed, holding that Dr. Hofmeister plainly satisfied the PFA’s kind-for-kind qualification requirements as applied to the relevant time period. The court conducted de novo review under Wiggins v. Hackensack Meridian Health, 259 N.J. 562 (2025), and applied the Supreme Court’s recent clarification that when a defending physician practices in more than one specialty and the treatment at issue falls within any of that physician’s specialty areas, an affidavit of merit from a physician specializing in one of those specialties is sufficient. Here, the inquiry was binary: was Dr. Hofmeister (1) board certified in internal medicine in March 2017, and (2) devoting a majority of his professional time to the active clinical practice of internal medicine from March 2016 to March 2017? The undisputed record answered both questions affirmatively. Defendant did not dispute Dr. Hofmeister’s board certification in internal medicine at the relevant time or his testimony that he spent the majority of his time functioning as a primary care doctor for his hematology patients across the full range of internal medicine conditions.
The trial court’s error, the Appellate Division explained, was twofold. First, the court improperly focused on Dr. Hofmeister’s current practice at Emory University — where he was housed in a separate hematology department — rather than on his credentials and practice as they existed at the time of the alleged malpractice. The PFA’s contemporaneity requirement directs inquiry to the relevant time period, and the overlap between internal medicine and hematology that existed during 2016-2017 was expressly permissible under Wiggins and its predecessors. Second, and perhaps more broadly significant, the trial court treated Dr. Hofmeister’s superior specialized training in hematology as a disqualifying demerit. The Appellate Division rejected that reasoning as an inversion of the kind-for-kind standard, warning it would create the very “minefield of hyper-technicalities” the Supreme Court condemned in Wiggins. The Legislature intended the AOM and PFA to impose threshold qualification requirements — not to exclude experts who have exceeded those thresholds.
Key Takeaways
- Under the PFA and the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Wiggins, a plaintiff’s expert need only meet the kind-for-kind requirement as to one of a multi-specialty defendant’s specialties; a hematologist who is also board-certified in internal medicine and practiced internal medicine at the relevant time satisfies the PFA’s requirements to opine against an internist defendant.
- The PFA’s qualification analysis is temporally anchored: courts must evaluate the expert’s credentials and active practice as they existed during the year preceding the incident giving rise to the claim, not at the time of testimony or trial.
- Having additional specialized training or expertise beyond the qualifying threshold cannot serve as a basis to exclude an expert; treating superior qualifications as a disqualifier misapplies the kind-for-kind rule and contradicts the Legislature’s intent not to bar meritorious claims.
Why It Matters
This decision is a meaningful clarification for New Jersey medical malpractice practitioners on both sides of the bar. Defense-side practitioners should take note that efforts to exclude plaintiff experts whose subspecialty training exceeds that of the defendant physician are likely to fail where the expert also holds board certification in the defendant’s primary specialty and was actively practicing in that specialty during the relevant period. The case reinforces that the PFA qualification analysis is not a standard of higher-is-worse, but rather a threshold inquiry of contemporaneous equivalency.
For plaintiff practitioners, Glassman reaffirms that academic physicians who hold dual certifications and split their clinical time between a specialty and subspecialty can qualify as standard-of-care experts provided their primary-specialty practice meets the statutory majority-of-time requirement at the critical time. The decision also confirms the dismissal as moot of defendant’s arguments for summary judgment and discovery exclusion, so the case returns to the trial court with Dr. Hofmeister’s opinions fully reinstated and the stay lifted. Given the New Jersey Association for Justice’s participation as amicus, the ruling carries broad practical significance for the medical malpractice bar.