Linda Cole, Wilderotter’s partner of 11 years and her legal spouse, arrived at the hospital, identified herself as Wilderotter’s partner …  and wasn’t allowed to see her. Only after Wilderotter’s sister also arrived was Cole given access to her partner.

Such a denial is a violation of both federal hospital visitation rights and Maryland law.

A hospital representative called the couple six weeks later to apologize, blaming poor communication and a new employee’s misunderstanding of the law for the denial. The hospital said the incident wasn’t an example of discrimination and that it’s reviewing patient rights training to make sure no one on staff makes such an error in the future.

Wilderotter and Cole weren’t satisfied. Cole has filed a complaint with the Joint Commission and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services over the incident.

The highest penalty of $100,000 was assessed on two hospitals:  Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center, Mission Viejo, and  Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla. In both cases, patients needed to have second operations performed to remove retained foreign objects after staff didn’t follow proper procedures.

The rest of the penalties were for $50,000 or $25,000. Most were for failure to follow surgical procedure or failing to implement appropriate policies for the safe administration of medication.

You can read the news release — with links to the individual reports for each incident at the California Department of Public Health.

The National Labor Relations Board claims that Holy Family Hospital of Methuen, Massachusetts, part of Steward Health Care System, fired Mary Ramirez for her activity leading a union organizing effort. Ramirez, 61, has 40 years of nursing experience, 18 of them at Holy Family. NLRB also said that nurses at Holy Family weren’t allowed to wear buttons showing support for Ramirez.

Through a spokesperson, Steward has denied the allegations, claiming that Ramirez was fired for a variety of performance issues that were reported to management by a fellow nurse. The hospital claimed that Ramirez intentionally changed a doctor’s order, made an intentional medication error, and didn’t enter a morphine dose in a patient’s record. (Ramirez doesn’t deny that she administered a drug intravenously rather than injecting it, but said it wasn’t an intentional error. She also noted that the patient wasn’t harmed in any way.)

The hospital also said that the Board of Registration put Ramirez on probation for two year for diverting patient medication for her own use. Ramirez didn’t deny the allegation, but again pointed out that no patients were harmed by her actions.

Ramirez maintains that her union activity was the real (and improper) reason for her firing. She’s seeking reinstatement to her position and back pay.

Hospitals’ incident reporting systems are only registering about 14% of patient injuries, according to a new study. 

That’s the conclusion of a new statement from the Office of the Inspector General. According to the report, hospitals investigate the patient harm events that are most likely to help them make safety or quality improvements and they made relatively few policy changes based on the events that were reported.

As for the other 86% of incidents, hospitals said 61% were events that the staff didn’t perceive as a reportable event. The rest were normally reported but not reported in that specific instance.

OIG noted that all the hospitals reviewed had incident reporting systems in place and that hospital managers say they rely on the systems to monitor quality of care and catch potential problems.

Because incident reporting is so vital to hospitals, OIG recommended that CMS take the following steps:

• collaborate with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to create a list of potentially reportable incidents that hospitals could use
• provide guidance to accreditors regarding their assessments of hospital efforts to track and analyze events
• suggest that surveyors evaluate the information collected by hospitals using AHRQ’s Common Formats, and
• scrutinize survey standards for assessing hospital compliance with the requirement to track and analyze events and reinforce assessment of incident reporting systems as a key tool to improve event tracking.

To see the full report as a downloadable PDF click here.

Will those steps actually improve incident reporting and make it easier for hospitals to improve overall patient care? Share your thoughts in the comments.

From hard-to-believe HIPAA violations to dogs performing medical tests, here are the top 10 most popular stories on HealthExecNews from 2011:

10. 5 things doctors wish more of the patients would do

9. Outrageous! Visitor hurt, nurse says: ‘Call 911′

8. Doctor sues patient’s family — and everybody loses

7. Want the most depressing job? Work in health care

6. Doc convicted of murder for lipo gone wrong

5. Patient says ‘leaked’ medical info ruined her life

4. The scary truth about two common drugs

3. Paging Dr. Pooch: Dogs almost as accurate as colonoscopies

2. Doc disciplined, fined over Facebook posts

1. One dumb move nets first civil HIPAA fine

The total for 2011 includes a record $2.8 billion in recoveries under the whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act, which is the government’s primary civil remedy to redress false claims for federal money or property, such as Medicare benefits, payments on military contracts, and federal subsidies and loans. $2.4 billion of that money came from cases involving fraud against federal health care programs.

A pathologist was awarded $7.6 million from a federal jury in her suit alleging racial and gender discrimination by her employer.

Dr. Vivian Renta was a senior attending physician with the Cook County (Illinois) pathology department in early 2003 when she filed a charge of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In the complaint, she claimed that she had suffered harassment and been paid less than her professional peers. Renta claimed the cause for the treatment was that she was a woman and Puerto Rican.

Three months after she filed the complaint, she was suspended from her job, and in September 2004 she was terminated. She had worked for the county for nine years.

Among other things, Renta claimed she was retaliated against because she tried to expose various incidents of misdiagnosis, negligence and other wrong-doing that put patient care and safety at risk. For its part, the hospital argued that Renta herself had misdiagnosed several patients and had demonstrated a pattern of not following protocols. Renta’s lawyer provided proof that her error rate was actually better than the national average.

The federal jury hearing the case agreed with Renta, and awarded her $4 million for pain and suffering and $3.2 million in lost wages and benefits. The jury specifically requested that the pathology chairman be ordered to pay Renta an additional $400,000. Note: The jury verdict isn’t final. The judge can reduce the award for pain and suffering to just $300,000.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will calculate hospital-specific expected readmission rates based on individual patients’ characteristics. Hospitals that exceed their expected rates will lose up to 1% of their Medicare payments in the first year. The amount of the penalty will increase to 2% the following year, and 3% the year after.

According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, about one fifth of patients make repeat visits. Readmissions cost the U.S. healthcare system over $17 billion a year and result in lower quality treatment and higher cost to taxpayers according to The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

Why so many readmissions? Often, it’s because hospital staff members failed to provide detailed and clear care instructions prior to discharge, according to experts quoted in a recent Washington Post article. Patients sometimes return home without a comprehensive understanding of the diagnosis, treatments, follow-up care and possible negative reactions.

Those experts recommend doctors and administrative staff always encourage patients to:

• Ask a lot of questions. Patients should understand all prescribed medications, the treatments they received, how to care for themselves properly and what symptoms to look for if something goes wrong.
• Follow-up with their regular doctor.
• Know who to contact with questions or for test results.

According to prosecutors, between October 2007 and April 2011, Morrison transferred funds from Munson’s Regional Healthcare Foundation’s bank account to an account for her former business. She used the money for such necessitates as buying dozens of boxes of trading cards.

Morrison is required to forfeit any funds and goods she acquired from the crime. So far, over $36,000 has already been seized from various bank accounts.

Even more shocking? Some apple juice samples contained inorganic arsenic, which has been linked to cancer and other diseases. But that’s not the whole story, if the ensuing controversy is any indication.

One centerpiece of the story was a televised debate between Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Richard Besser. Originally, Besser had disagreed with Oz’s allegations that there are trace amounts of dangerous arsenic in popular brands of apple juice. Besser responded to Oz’s statements by saying, ”You are telling parents they are poisoning their children, and you have no evidence.”

However, Besser publicly apologized to Oz on Wednesday, saying that the Food and Drug Administration had provided faulty data. The FDA claimed that there is an industry standard, and that the arsenic found in apple juice is the “safe” kind (organic arsenic, which is common in many foods we consume).

But the real issue is not which doctor won the battle, but whether or not apple juice is safe. While there’s little consensus on the matter, Besser for one doesn’t advise children under the age of seven to consume more than 4-6 ounces, and he says that babies under 6 months should not consume any.