Chicago surgeon who oversaw heart operation in Alaska where patient died could now lose Illinois license

With his medical license temporarily suspended in Illinois since 2023 following the death of a heart patient in Alaska, a Chicago surgeon is facing a disciplinary proceeding next month that could help determine whether he will ever practice medicine here again.

Once licensed in multiple states, Dr. Cosmin Dobrescu was issued a “physician temporary permit” in Alaska in September 2022 so he could serve in a “locum tenens” role — essentially working as a cardiothoracic surgeon on an as-needed basis at Alaska Regional Hospital in Anchorage.

In December 2022, Dobrescu operated on a 73-year-old man in poor health “to replace a stenotic aortic valve and revascularize the coronary arteries,” according to public records that say a “cascade of problems developed during the surgery” and the patient ended up “dying on the table.”

Two other doctors subsequently filed a complaint against Dobrescu, alleging they witnessed “unsafe care” during the 13-hour operation and that “he was a threat to the health and welfare of the public,” according to a February 2023 affidavit from an investigator for Alaska’s professional regulatory agency.

The affidavit “supported” a request by the agency to suspend Dobrescu’s license, which Alaska’s medical board acted on days later, concluding he “poses a clear and immediate danger to the public health and safety if he continues to practice medicine.”

Within days, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, the arm of state government that regulates doctors in Illinois, temporarily suspended his Illinois license based on Alaska’s decision.

Illinois law allows regulators to “revoke, suspend, place on probation, reprimand, refuse to issue or renew, or take any other disciplinary or non-disciplinary action” on the basis of “adverse action taken by another state or jurisdiction.”

Last year, Alaska revoked his medical license, and New York followed suit.

Pointing to those decisions, Illinois regulators filed a new complaint calling for Dobrescu’s license to be “suspended, revoked, or otherwise disciplined.”

An administrative trial was recently set for March 31 after which a judge will issue findings and a disciplinary recommendation to the Illinois State Medical Board, whose members are appointed by the governor.

The medical board can adopt the conclusions or come to its own. Either way, the matter lands with a top administrator at the state’s financial and professional regulation department for a final decision.

Regulators don’t need to prove the allegations against Dobrescu, only that another jurisdiction took “adverse action” against him.

A graduate of Northwestern University and raised in Munster, Indiana, Dobrescu has portrayed the central allegations against him in Alaska as “false,” saying the investigator’s affidavit was rife with misinformation and laid the mistakes of others on him.

One of the complaining doctors alleged that Dobrescu “used a nonstandard strategy of transecting the aorta entirely to gain access to the aortic valve, which led to significant bleeding that Dr. Dobrescu was unable to remedy,” according to the affidavit.

When Dobrescu “was confronted with the severe bleeding from his suture lines,” he persisted “in a failing strategy of adding stitches... and refused to perform hypothermic circulatory arrest despite repeated recommendations to do so,” according to the affidavit.

The complaining doctor said that “in efforts to repair the bleeding that Dr. Dobrescu had caused, Dr. Dobrescu inadvertently perforated the pulmonary artery,” the affidavit said.

Dobrescu has, in turn, pointed blame for the outcome of the surgery on one of the complaining doctors, an anesthesiologist, who Dobrescu alleged “did not replace blood products correctly” as the patient bled out, records show.

The anesthesiologist has insisted he acted properly, and an administrative law judge in Alaska concluded in 2025 that “the evidence is too ambiguous to make a clear finding on whether there were departures from the standard of care in the final administration of blood products,” records show.

The judge also seemed to find no major fault in how Dobrescu performed the surgery, writing: “Fundamentally, the demonstrated problem with this surgery is not its execution, but instead that it probably should not have been occurring in the first place.”

The judge hammered Dobrescu for forging ahead with an operation not deemed urgent.

Dobrescu’s “recommendation on December 5 to go to surgery on December 7 overlooked important risk factors” — including “poor” diabetes control in the patient — “as did his downstream failure to reconsider up to the hour of surgery,” the judge wrote.

“The decision-making process fell below the standard of care.”

The judge wrote that the patient’s death “was substantially related to the substandard pre-operative risk evaluation,” and that after “losing a patient in this manner, the licensee” — Dobrescu — “exhibited deeply irresponsible behavior by failing to provide an operative report.”

Dobrescu said he was “put in an impossible position” because his lawyer advised not to immediately release that report due to concerns it would be used to help prosecute him for negligent homicide, though a criminal case never materialized.

An autopsy could have provided more clarity over the man’s death, but for reasons still unclear one wasn’t conducted initially and wasn’t possible later because the patient had been cremated, records show.

The judge’s ruling also found regulators had “proven” that Dobrescu “obtained licensure in Alaska by fraud” by failing to reveal on his paperwork that he “was under active investigation in Virginia” administratively “for incompetence.”

Dobrescu argued that a consultant he’d hired to complete the application advised that the Virginia investigation — which examined his personal and professional conduct in a number of states — didn’t need to be disclosed.

The Alaska patient’s daughter testified at Alaska’s administrative hearing that she was there when her father was wheeled into surgery, records show.

“I hugged him, and I kissed him, and I told him to do good,” she said.

“And he said, ‘Don't tell me. Tell them to do good.’”