Dive Brief:
- California's latest round of administrative penalties have hit 13 hospitals where patients have either died or faced serious injury due to failure to comply with state regulations.
- Across the 13 hospitals, five patients died, a sixth ended up with severe neurological damage, a seventh coded but was resuscitated, and an eighth endured a second surgery because of a retained surgical sponge.
- These incidents, which resulted from failure to comply with regulations, resulted in $475,000 in financial penalties under the state's "immediate jeopardy" law. The state also fined another five hospitals $295,000 where mental or behavioral health patients were harmed.
Dive Insight:
While no hospital wants to pay out fines, these seem like relatively modest sums for all but the smallest hospitals. Especially when a never event occurs (the sponge left in the patient) it should trigger not only fines but a full-scale investigation of how the hospital's processes work. You can't fine a broken process out of existence but you can diagnose and fix the broken process. Let's hope these hospitals have done thorough investigations of their own. The "plan of correction" that they filed with the state may not be enough.