The Medical Board of California is being asked to set up a hearing to consider revoking its three-year probation order for an Irvine ophthalmologist, who has allegedly violated several conditions that accompanied that discipline.
Technically, as of July 13, 2017, Dr. Amir Pirouzian’s license was revoked under the board discipline system, which allows such an order to be stayed if the respondent can successfully complete probation conditions.
The Tehran, Iran-born, UC Irvine-educated ophthalmologist told a psychologist and his employers at Children’s Specialists of San Diego (CSSD) that he was suffering from depression and needed to take a sabbatical from work–without informing either he had applied for a new job with the Santa Clara Kaiser Permanente office.
While on sabbatical, the medical board discovered, Pirouzian joined the Kaiser facility’s staff, drawing paychecks and disability checks at the same time.
Under terms of his medical license’s three years and eight months of probation, the ophthalmologist was required to: take an ethics course, undergo a psychiatric evaluation, have his practice and billing services monitored and enter a clinical competence assessment program. He also had to obey all laws, submit quarterly progress reports to the board, and he was forbidden from supervising physician assistants or advanced practice nurses.
It stated right there in the board’s discipline order, which Pirouzian and his attorney accepted with their signatures to a state document, that failure to abide by the conditions of probation might cost him his medical license permanently.
It alleges that Pirouzian failed to: undergo a psychiatric evaluation; comply with the medical board’s probation unit; have his practice and billing monitored by the board; make himself available for an interview with a board designee; notify clinics and hospitals where he has privileges of his probationary status; complete the required ethics course and clinical competence assessment program; and inform the board of periods longer than 30 days when he did not practice medicine and, within 15 days, tell the board that he was practicing again.
The board is being asked to immediately suspend Dr. Pirouzian’s license until the matter is fully resolved.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.