By Stacey Burlin
Inquirer Staff Writer

In the month since a Bucks County couple sued Doylestown Hospital for failing to screen their newborn daughter for a metabolic disease that almost killed her, three area hospitals—including Doylestown—have begun testing babies for a wider array of diseases.

The tests are not required by state law, but most Pennsylvania hospitals outside the Philadelphia region voluntarily provide them. Hospitals in New Jersey do not.

When caught early, many of these rare diseases are treatable with changes in diet and careful monitoring. If undetected, they can cause devastating physical and mental problems.

The couple's lawyer, Charles Hehmeyer, of Philadelphia, contends that because most hospitals in Pennsylvania are doing the additional tests, hospitals that do not are violating the “standard of care.”

Susan Gordon, a spokeswoman for Doylestown Hospital, said it began offering expanded screening this month in response to publicity surrounding the suit filed by Michael and Michele Sciss of Upper Black Eddy.

The hospital had been planning to start the extra screening in July, she said, but changed the date after the lawsuit was filed late last month.

The Scisses' daughter, Bailey, was born almost two years ago. It was three weeks before doctors at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia realized that Bailey, by then in a coma, was suffering from a metabolic disorder called propionic acidernia. She recovered but is developmentally delayed, and the extent of her brain damage is not known, her mother said.

The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania also began doing the extra screening tests on April 1, according to Neo Gen Screening, a Pittsburgh company that does tests required by the state as well as what it calls supplemental screening. That change had been in the works before the lawsuit.

Pennsylvania Hospital, part of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, had planned to begin doing the tests in July but moved its start date to this month as well.

Pennsylvania Hospital had been giving babies in its intensive-care unit the extra tests since 1996 and had discussed expanding the practice to all babies for months, said Jeffrey Gerdes, its chief of newborn pediatrics.

Pennsylvania requires that babies be tested for four metabolic diseases—phenylketonuria (PKU), hypothyroidism, sickle-cell disease, and maple syrup urine disease—but 85 percent of the state s hospitals voluntarily screen for an additional 26 diseases, according to Neo Gen.

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