US hospital told family their daughter had checked out when in fact she'd died

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/21/sacramento-hospital-patient-death-checked-out

by howard941 • 2 years ago

405 200 2 years ago

an autopsy that could have indicated whether there had been medical malpractice associated with her death was “rendered impossible”, according to the lawsuit

This crosses into criminal liability.

blackeyeblitzar5• 2 years ago

This is just horrible but I’m not surprised since I have read so many stories of malpractice recently, from the skull flap thing to the Texas hospital triple booking surgeons to other stuff

CatWChainsaw2• 2 years ago

Triple booking surgeons? Do they think patients in need of surgeries are just going to up and cancel, and hospitals are behaving like airlines?

spondylosaurus• 2 years ago

Dare I ask about "the skull flap thing"?

jb19912• 2 years ago

It's amazing how many stories like this come out of the U.S. Normally, one can say "you get what you pay for" but what American hospitals charge for this level of quality is so expensive compared to other countries.

jklinger410• 2 years ago

I'm glad we pay for the most expensive medical care in the world in the US. That's what keeps the quality so high.

realo• 2 years ago

Sorry but I think you pay for the most expensive _doctors_ in the world...

It would seem that the actual care you receive is only remotely related to that.

pinkmuffinere• 2 years ago

The comment you’re replying to was sarcastic, I think they probably strongly agree with you.

(Not your fault not to notice though, sarcasm can be very subtle)

bourbonjuggler• 2 years ago

"Dignity Health, which operates Mercy San Juan..."

It appears they need a name change after this lawsuit

LiquidSky• 2 years ago

As usual when entities have these noble names, they don’t mean your or my dignity.

evantbyrne• 2 years ago

Low quality places have the most absurd names in this country. For example, there is a trailer park nearby with a "Manor Lane". At least they put it by "Shady Lane" to balance expectations.

celdon25• 2 years ago

Dignity health is god awful. I've never had a good experience with them.

debo_• 2 years ago

The "in" in "indignity" is silent.

HorizonXP• 2 years ago

I read the headline expecting that it was a simple misunderstanding or clerical error, with limited impact to within 24 hours.

The article is so much worse and the headline buries the lede. I would be horrified. My condolences to the family.

bluSCALE44• 2 years ago

Completely agree. I can't imagine being lead on a wild goose chase looking for a loved one only to be told by police that said party lied to me. I guess there's a lesson here: talk with nurses. I'm sure some would toe the line but if something smells fishy, I'm sure someone will crack. Then again, maybe only one nurse would know the truth so it's may not be easy.

smcin• 2 years ago

It's worse than that, it's like burying a double or even triple lede:

- it's not just that the hospital told her family totally the wrong thing for a day or a year...

- or even negligently cremated or buried her in a pauper's grave...

- but they also mishandled the corpse, which IIUC is a misdemeanor (corpse desecration, which is a felony, might not apply), by shipping her decomposing body to an off-site warehouse morgue.

- and failing to timely issue a death certificate or do an autopsy prevents determining whether there had been medical malpractice associated with her death.

bluSCALE44• 2 years ago

I wonder if it's possible that she checked herself out but immediately died outside the hospital which would explain why the paper work was in order. I would not explain why after being ID'd, why family wasn't informed or how she was placed into offsite storage facility. Gross incompetence and criminal negligence. I hope the family gets the 5x the jury award as requested. Didn't know you could even do that.

cogman10• 2 years ago

I wonder if it's possible that she checked herself out but immediately died outside the hospital

I find that really unlikely.

I mean, for starters, they had her body and knew it was her body in storage. That doesn't happen if they don't have IDs attached to the corpse. I find it unlikely that the hospital wouldn't be ringing the family like crazy because of a body they want to unload. Especially if they have the paperwork showing that she'd checked out. There'd be no reason not to almost immediately say "Hey, actually, we found her right outside the hospital dead, sorry for your loss".

I'm guessing an obvious fuck up killed her like 10xing her insulin dosage by mistake. Or administering something other than insulin.

And it wouldn't surprise me if, conveniently, 17 or 24 months just happens to be the retention policy for medical records.

Terr_• 2 years ago

And it wouldn't surprise me if, conveniently, 17 or 24 months just happens to be the retention policy for medical records.

This was in California, where the law [0] is 7 years minimum, potentially more if the patient was a minor.

AFAICT every state wants at least ~5 years of retention.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/regulations/california/22-CCR-72...

sonotathrowaway• 2 years ago

Or they needed to keep the body long enough that any evidence of malpractice could be hidden.

geor9e• 2 years ago

Like she died and the medical examiner took her directly? It doesn't sound like it from this: "The 31-year-old died in the care of Mercy San Juan medical center in Sacramento in April 2023. The hospital shipped her body to a storage facility"

bluSCALE44• 2 years ago

I hear you but they also say that she signed herself out. That means she signed a waiver.

LorenPechtel• 2 years ago

I think that would have been figured out. However, I see another scenario:

She checks herself out (given that she called about leaving I find it reasonable to think she might have), goes to the bathroom and arrests in a stall but is not discovered for a while.

The family is looking for her, the hospital correctly notes that she had checked herself out. Eventually her body is found. She's not a patient since she checked herself out. Somehow it fell through the cracks about notifying her family, or perhaps she didn't have ID on her and the body was sent as a Jane Doe.

015a• 2 years ago

Hospital management: "What new system or form can we add so our liability is limited in this happening again? Just one more e-signature bro, it'll work this time I swear, this is the one, just one more."

djmips• 2 years ago

They'll get it added to your Disney+ subscription.

khaki54• 2 years ago

Crazy. I wonder if they made a mistake, somehow killing her, but thought she was indigent or mentally ill, and that's why they did all this. Then again, it sounds like she was treated many times by this hospital. I cannot fathom the circumstances where the actions after her death could have been a simple mistake, but they've had 16 months to come up with a story and destroy all the evidence, so we may never know the truth.

primitivesuave2• 2 years ago

Honestly, this was the first thought I had when I read the article. I worked in this space for several years and interacted with many doctors - just like in any other professional industry, some people have stellar reputations that precede them, while a few are infamous for their malpractice and unethical behavior. The perverse incentive arises when a hospital has a publicized malpractice lawsuit or criminal investigation - everyone who works at that for-profit medical institution has an incentive to protect its reputation (i.e. its profitability). This has allowed "angel of death" doctors/nurses to kill hundreds of people over the years, since there isn't much incentive to dig too deeply into "excess mortality" statistics (a famous example being Harold Shipman who could have easily been detected 2 years and over 100 victims earlier).

Covering up a case of medical malpractice by surreptitiously filling out discharge paperwork is certainly possible. A surprisingly large component of healthcare processes is to blindly trust that doctors are manually entering information truthfully and accurately. The fact that they couldn't locate her body for an entire year strongly suggests a criminal conspiracy to hide the body.

yosito• 2 years ago

As a victim of medical malpractice, it's terrifying to me that someone could have killed me to cover it up.

jofer• 2 years ago

You'd be amazed how bad hospitals can be at keeping track of fairly critical things.

I had a cousin who voluntarily checked himself into the hospital related to severe withdrawal symptoms (and had bouts of psychosis related to said with withdrawal - meth addictions are nasty). His mother stayed for awhile but had to leave for work. She was repeatedly guaranteed by multiple doctors and nurses that he could not check himself out and would be there for several days at least. They told her to come back the next morning.

Late that night, he was discharged. Not even "he checked himself out". The hospital discharged him (and that's over an hour ride away from home, btw - no hospitals in rural areas these days).

He had no phone and no wallet. According to staff, he tried to call his mother to pick him up, but couldn't remember her cell phone number (it had changed recently). He called his sister and left a message, but she was traveling and didn't get it until much later. According to the hospital, he tried to call several different numbers trying to get a ride home and they made him stop and made him leave. In a quite rough downtown area he was not familiar with. While clearly not in his right mind. At 2am. With no wallet, no phone, no nothing.

The hospital had his mother's contact info. They did not give it to him even when he requested it. They did not attempt to contact her in any way.

We still don't know what happened afterwards. His body was found four days later in the river and it had been there for awhile.

Forcibly discharging someone under those circumstances and refusing to even contact their emergency contacts is beyond belief. I'm furious about it. Apparently it's common and not even something there's any recourse for.

mrinfinitiesx• 2 years ago

Reading that makes me incredibly outraged. I'm sorry that happened and your family had to go through that.

JohnMakin6• 2 years ago

When I was a teenageer a school counselor incorrectly perceived me to be in a crisis and had me sent to 72 hour hold (which stays on certain records for quite a while and can be incredibly disruptive, but that's besides the point) - for some reason I was sent almost 40 miles away in another county in a city I'd never been. The hospital doctors took one look at me and realized I didn't belong there, but to do a discharge apparently is a pretty lengthy process once this process is initiated - almost 20 hours later (again, being held completely against my will for no reason) they released me. I asked them where I was supposed to go and if I could call my dad. They said no, but they gave me two (2) bus tokens, which wasn't enough to get back where my car was parked at the school, plus I had no idea how to use the bus system in that county, and didn't have my glasses, phone, or wallet.

I really don't know how long it took or how I made it, but many many hours later I made it back to my car. I had to beg for money and walk the last several miles once I recognized finally where I was. It really sucked, and ever since then I've had a great deal of sympathy for people that are churned through this terrible system and spit right back out with no dignity whatsoever, let alone empathy. This incident disrupted my life irreversibly (ended up missing tests and having to do a medical withdrawal from school, lost scholarships, etc) and derailed a lot of things I had wanted to do for many, many years. The hospital/medical care industrial complex doesn't optimize for empathy. They're just trying to get the bodies through as quickly as possible.

FireBeyond2• 2 years ago

in a crisis and had me sent to 72 hour hold

Oftentimes it's not even that, or can go to the opposite extreme. It can be "or until evaluated by a psychiatrist or MHP".

I'm a paramedic in Washington. The biggest example of this I remember was a 14yo, intentional pharma overdose. We brought her in, "invol". Four and a half hours later, call goes out, same address, 14 year old girl, overdose. We checked with dispatch, was there a glitch?

Nope. Psychiatrist had spoken to her, determined she was "no threat to herself". Parents drove her home, and within fifteen minutes she'd locked herself in the bathroom again, and taken more of the same meds.

Was furious. Between the psychiatrist, parents not locking up the meds, hell, the ER, she probably still had drugs in her system.

"Maybe hold on to her for more than four hours this time."

Also, tangentially, if EMS wants to transport you involuntarily, we actually need Law Enforcement involvement - they don't even necessarily need to talk to the patient, but they do need to complete the paperwork that takes them into custody, which they then "assign" to us. EMS generally has no power to treat you against your will (however, if you are actively a threat to yourself, we can act on that, usually restraint and sedation. Or there is 'implied consent' where if you lose the ability to effectively consent, the law assumes that a rational person would want aid to be rendered).

aidenn02• 2 years ago

The hospital/medical care industrial complex doesn't optimize for empathy. They're just trying to get the bodies through as quickly as possible.

That must be why health care is so affordable (/s)

romwell2• 2 years ago

When I was a teenageer a school counselor incorrectly perceived me to be in a crisis and had me sent to 72 hour hold

How could they do that without notifying your parents and telling them exactly where you've been sent to, and what they should do?!

How could they've done that without giving the hospital your parents' contact info? How could the hospital accept you without requesting it, given that you were sent from school, where you have limited rights because they have the responsibility for your well-being?

How could have they discharged without allowing you to contact your family yourself?

This should be grounds for a civil lawsuit, if not criminal prosecution. I am not a lawyer, but I really hope that anyone reading this would contact one if they end in a situation like that.

They're just trying to get the bodies through as quickly as possible.

I don't think taking 30 seconds over those 20 hours to contact your family would've slowed them down any.

This is not about efficiency. They should not be allowed to operate.

m4632• 2 years ago

didn't have my glasses, phone, or wallet.
I made it back to my car

and although no glasses or license, did you have keys? could you drive?

colechristensen• 2 years ago

Are they suing the hospital and care team for many millions of dollars? That's the level of neglect of responsibility that should get you enough money to own the hospital that did that kind of thing.

I regularly have to aggressively bully medical care teams for myself and others to get them to do the right, obvious things.

I do not trust doctors, they do not care to figure out problems, ignore so many people's problems, and make wildly stupid mistakes all of the time.

ghostly_s3• 2 years ago

Are they suing the hospital and care team for many millions of dollars?

Did you try clicking the link? They are. 5 million dollars. I expect they will win, and that still won't make them whole.

nostrademons2• 2 years ago

I wonder how much this correlates with socioeconomic status.

When my kids were born, the hospital had this incredibly elaborate, incredibly detailed checklists of things that needed to be in order before they would let you leave. Did you have a carseat? Did you have a ride home? Did the doctor come by and give you discharge instructions? Do you have all the belongings you came with? Did you fill out the birth certificate application? Have all your discharge papers been signed?

They actually wouldn't let my wife walk herself down - they had to call Transport, and she had to be wheeled down in a wheelchair with the baby's carseat on her lap, and I had to be waiting at the designated curbside to pick her up. She was perfectly capable of walking herself down, and we were both capable of putting the carseat into the car in a normal parking spot, but everything had to be done in the presence of an orderly.

This is the same health care company mentioned in the article, but at a pretty affluent suburb of Silicon Valley.

ghostly_s3• 2 years ago

None of those checklist things are done out of an interest in care - it is about avoiding liability.

pyuser5833• 2 years ago

Those checklists have done a good job preventing infant kidnapping.

monetus• 2 years ago

They actually wouldn't let my wife walk herself down - they had to call Transport, and she had to be wheeled down in a wheelchair with the baby's carseat on her lap, and I had to be waiting at the designated curbside to pick her up. She was perfectly capable of walking herself down, and we were both capable of putting the carseat into the car in a normal parking spot, but everything had to be done in the presence of an orderly.

I have tonic-clonic seizures; at least 4 hospitals have wheeled me out that way, suffering no argument otherwise. I guess it is common.

mlinhares• 2 years ago

A lot. A friend worked for years in a well known hospital in PHL (that closed somewhat recently), and they were pushed to get people with no insurance out as fast as they could.

If they know you won't be paying, they will try to kick you out as fast as they can and consequences be damned, if you don't have insurance you likely don't know/understand your rights and wouldn't sue them.

protocolture• 2 years ago

We had the opposite. They tried on multiple occasions to evict my wife after a C section while she was in an incredible amount of pain.

They kept giving her an oxy in the morning, then after it set in, asking her to rate her pain level, and recording it. Which is backwards.

Then they blamed her for not asking for more pain meds, which she had.

Then they told her to just ask for more pain meds, which we did.

Then the nurse told her that shes not allowed to have any more pain meds. At which point I went full Karen, got our stay extended by 2 nights.

Apparently the midwives expected her to be walking up and down the corridor, which was not a requirement and not part of the treatment, just to demonstrate her pain levels.

vegardx• 2 years ago

Having a low child mortality is important, and we've done so many good things in the last couple of decades, but I'm starting to think we're at the point now where the money you have to spend to make a meaningful difference is better spent in other areas of health care.

A classical example of this is in Norway. There's nothing that gives you access to more resources than being pregnant or being in care of a newborn. You can suffer from all kinds of mental health issues for your entire life, struggle to be a productive member of society and be in and out of temporary treatment and be on social benefits. But the moment someone is pregnant they get will be top priority for anything that is even remotely connected with child mortality, almost regardless of how benign something is.

I personally know several people that finally got the help they had been so desperately been begging for, just because they got pregnant. We could have saved them from literal decades of suffering by just providing good treatment early. I'm willing to bet that we'd even be in a position to spend even more money on reducing child mortality, because when you start doing the math of how much they ended up costing society it really adds up.

SCUSKU• 2 years ago

Good lord that's awful, I'm sorry for your loss.

lupusreal4• 2 years ago

Such professionalism and high quality care like this are why American doctors deserve their huge salaries, massive houses and vacation properties, boats and sports cars, and of course are entitled to our thanks and adoration. Truly, a saintly class of people who all got into this line of work to help people.

shiroiushi• 2 years ago

I think the doctors aren't the ones to blame here, it's the hospital administrators.

rxyz• 2 years ago

News flash - most doctors all over the world are doing it for money and status. It's a job.

unethical_ban• 2 years ago

To force someone out who was guaranteed wouldn't be; to withhold documented caretaker/relative phone numbers from them when they have no other help; then to force them from the premises with no resources.

I want this to be a lie, but I don't treat HN comments that way. This is horrible, absolutely appalling.

Arrath2• 2 years ago

You'd be amazed how bad hospitals can be at keeping track of fairly critical things.

Got to experience that first-hand when my partner lost her pregnancy. We went in for the procedure to remove the nonviable fetus and were advised we had 14 days to arrange for a mortuary to take the remains if we wished to keep them, which we did. At 7 days when the mortuary tried to arrange for pick-up, we were informed that the hospital had disposed of the remains. It was "very uncommon" for people to want to take the remains, so they got lax in following their procedure and jumped the guns. Left us nothing to take home. It still sucks.

nick3443• 2 years ago

That sucks. I hope you will get to take home a healthy baby in your future.

DoctorOetker• 2 years ago

that stuff is worth a lot, probably went to the highest bidder, tissue banks, stem cells, ... they probably tell the same to all the parents, to redirect the anger towards some average Jane and Joe... while trying not to visualize the ice and careful packaging in which they got it "disposed off" through some medical courier.

(sarcasm warning) But who can fault them, imagine they had to explain to each pair of parents from scratch what is happening behind the scenes, and how such decisions are being made with little to no public discussion let alone democratic oversight? The time it would take compared to the harvesting itself would be intolerable. Intolerable! Not to speak of having to invest in bulletproof panes from behind which they would quickly learn to explain all this.

ghufran_syed2• 2 years ago

if it's true that he was discharged and didn't leave against medical advice, that sounds like a fairly straightforward and expensive lawsuit against the hospital. And some hospitals only change their behavior when beaten by large expensive lawsuits...

nyokodo• 2 years ago

Forcibly discharging someone under those circumstances and refusing to even contact their emergency contacts is beyond belief

I don’t know what it is legally but morally that is negligent manslaughter.

caseyy• 2 years ago

One time I went to A&E in the UK, I saw a young unconscious woman outside, laying next to a wheelchair. I told the receptionist and was told she had to come in for treatment. Another patient tried to get her into the wheelchair but ultimately I got an ambulance involved to bring her in.

The nurse then recognized the woman, for it was the very nurse who had rolled her out for fresh air some time ago.

It was a cold night, as well. I think there was some snow, or it was about to snow.

There is definitely an over-reliance on schematics in emergency medicine. The moment a slightly more complicated patient is involved or one falls outside the schematic otherwise, their risk of serious health injury or death goes up a lot.

This was always interesting to me. I went to medschool, and I remember my peers as people who genuinely wanted to help others. Few would have refused to help someone collapsed outside in the cold. But our medical system has changed a lot, many more people do it for the pay slip. Most probably still care about the patients but I suppose some portion genuinely don’t. If it’s not on the schematic, they won’t care for it.

hnlmorg• 2 years ago

Being overworked will do that to you.

It’s like asking a software engineer to write a hundred new features in a given sprint while the rest of the application is in flames. Eventually you stop aspiring to build good software and just hope enough of your code works that it’s good enough for some people.

Unfortunately medical services are literal life and death services. So we have it much easier as software engineers.

itronitron• 2 years ago

I've always had the experience that all employees at hospitals act like contractors. Usually great at what they do but no sense or willingness to look beyond their direct job responsibility.

akira2501• 2 years ago

Apparently it's common and not even something there's any recourse for.

It's a sad fact but hospitals have no one who is responsible for advocating for your care. I think it's a major ethical flaw in our entire healthcare model. People are not medical experts or legal experts and when they are suffering they're even less capable of handling that burden.

To expect the hospital with a financial incentive to do this is absolute folly. It just doesn't happen. They'll _absolutely_ get your insurance information, even when you're laying in the ER and doctors are still attending to you, but they'll provide you less than nothing when it comes to understanding your care and your options.

We afford people public defenders as disinterested third parties when they're accused of the most petty of crimes, yet, you're absolutely on your own when it comes to the hospital. This is a complete social moral failure.

Der_Einzige3• 2 years ago

The number one actual reason to have kids is to guarantee that you have your own de facto “medical advocate” who will do all of what you described for you.

Those who don’t have kids will learn quickly how hospitals treat those without children. It’s not pretty.

romwell2• 2 years ago

I am so sorry for what happened to your brother and your family.

The hospital is directly responsible for your cousin's death.

The fact that they assured the mother that they'll keep him, specifically told her to come the next day, and then forcibly discharged him at 2am without either calling his mother or even providing mother's contact to him should be grounds for criminal prosecution.

This is beyond negligence. They lied to the mother and knowingly forced him out when they were responsible for his well-being.

It would've cost them $0.00 to dial his mom's number. The fact that he asked for his mom's phone and they refused means they did it on purpose. This sounds very much like and indication of malicious intent to me.

I hope your family sues the bejeesus out of the hospital, and that someone will get a felony charge over this.

This hospital mot merely betrayed the trust of your family. It is literally a public health hazard. It should not continue existing.

lhamil64• 2 years ago

Last time I went to the ER, they checked me in under the completely wrong name. Like it wasn't even close. Luckily I noticed the wrist band was wrong and pointed it out, but they then had to re-do tests since they had been done under the other person. It really makes me think how bad that could have been though. What if I went unconscious, and they used the info on the wrist band to look up medical history? What if they gave me medication based on that incorrect history? And at the very least they wouldn't have the right emergency contact info...

RoyalHenOil4• 2 years ago

That is potentially extremely dangerous for the person they mistook you for as well, and they would have NO way to notice it and fix it. Catching that mistake possibly saved both of your lives!

jb19912• 2 years ago

You'd be amazed how bad hospitals can be at keeping track of fairly critical things.

should be

You'd be amazed how bad hospitals in the States can be at keeping track of fairly critical things.

sweeter• 2 years ago

It's sad that the for profit healthcare system incentivises leaving an entire town without critical healthcare. It is a failure on every level.

m4632• 2 years ago

We need AIs for personal advocacy.

croes2• 2 years ago

Mercy San Juan hospital failed in its most fundamental duty to notify Jessie’s family of her death

Despite the misconduct, I think saving people's lives is the most fundamental duty of a hospital.

dgfitz• 2 years ago

Yeah: “we failed at our one job” should have been IMMEDIATELY expressed to the family.

layer83• 2 years ago

There can be multiple most fundamental duties: https://proofwiki.org/wiki/Maximal_Element_need_not_be_Uniqu...

vsuperpower20212• 2 years ago

This is one of those things where people think that because they learned something in set theory 101 or intro to computers that it maps perfectly to real life situations.

bigstrat2003• 2 years ago

Look, that's a great proof and all but it has nothing to do with the situation at hand. Just because mathematics say there can be two maximal elements doesn't mean morality agrees - and this is the domain of morality, not mathematics.

croes2• 2 years ago

But it says "its" not "one of its", that suggests only one maximum.

polartx2• 2 years ago

You are interpreting “fundamental” as ‘highest priority’, which is not the only, (or most commonly expressed) definition of the word.

Fundamental is also defined as “so basic as to be hard to alter, resolve, or overcome.”

I would argue that ‘saving lives’ is not a ‘basic’ process; it is complex. However, informing someone’s next-of-kin of their passing, is a basic (ie fundamental) role of a healthcare facility.

EE84M3i2• 2 years ago

This might sound silly, but technically speaking how does this kind of notification work in relation to HIPAA? Is there some kind of a carve out that allows hospitals to tell your family you've "been discharged against medical advice"? How does next of kin notification work for death?

To put it another way, clearly the outcome in this story was unacceptable, but what was the correct outcome?

primitivesuave2• 2 years ago

You're conflating information privacy guidelines (i.e. HIPAA) with next-of-kin reporting which is usually specified by state law. If you check out the probate process which distributes an estate after death, it can vary considerably from state to state and has a lot more judicial involvement. HIPAA is not an enforced statute or law, it's a set of civil rights guidelines which allow hefty fines to be levied by OCR (Office of Civil Rights) when a violation is reported and investigated.

HIPAA does specifically allow for the sharing of PHI with family and friends of a with substantial leeway given to medical professionals to document their reasoning for sharing information if it is "in the patient's best interest". In the hypothetical scenario where concerned family/friends are inquiring about a discharge, it would be perfectly acceptable to share certain details of the discharge if the healthcare provider is willing to document and possibly defend their decision.

In this case, not reporting to next of kin was certainly not in the patient's best interest and a prima facie case of misconduct. As someone who sat at the intersection of health and law for several years, I can't see any possible legal justification or loophole for the hospital to avoid a hefty settlement. As some of the other comments on this thread suggest, this shocking oversight may not be an isolated case, so a hefty monetary penalty is the only realistic way to force the other for-profit health systems of America to implement better processes for this.

EE84M3i2• 2 years ago

I see, that makes sense, thanks!

So, after the patient died, what is the mechanism by which the family should have been contacted?

Later, if that failed and the family came to ask the hospital, the correct answer was "they're dead", not "we can't tell you" (and especially not "they were discharged against medical advice"!). How does the hospital authenticate and authorize the inquiry party?

Edit: also, is being dead PHI?

cowsandmilk2• 2 years ago

Death certificates can be shared with parents, siblings, and children of the deceased in every state; and most states they are public records that everyone can access.

Obviously the death certificate here was quite delayed, but this shows that generally the fact of death is something that can be shared with those suing.

tppiotrowski• 2 years ago

Personal story:

A couple of years ago I climbed Mt Whitney in California. One of the climbers that day was from the east coast and failed to show up for work a few days later. The family became concerned and called the car rental agency in Las Vegas where he flew to and rented his car. The agency said the car had been returned. After another day of him missing they called the car rental agency again to confirm and once again the agency said the car was in the lot. The next day the rangers found the car was still parked in the Mt Whitney parking lot and search and rescue was finally dispatched.

In this case I believe it didn't make a difference because the climber appeared to die from acute injury on the mountain the day of his climb but in another scenario maybe those 2 days would've been the difference between being rescued or dying from exposure.

pyuser5833• 2 years ago

I recently faced a personal catastrophe because a low ranking clerical worker mixed up a form.

I’m not mad about it. I’m mad there’s no apology because the company insists they did nothing wrong.

Another company, the one reading the form, is responsible for services rendered in regards to the form. Clearly not the form-fillers fault.

aidenn02• 2 years ago

Oh so many systems take "pass the buck" to an insane level. My employer switched insurance providers recently. Twice we were referred to a specialist for one of my kids and each time it took about a week for the referral to be approved (apparently the PCP referring you isn't enough with this HMO).

The only thing that has changed is my HMO; the kids still have the same pediatrician with the same office staff for which referrals were never a problem in the past. However, the insurance company made sure to tell me that they are not the ones delaying it, because it's technically the administrative department of my pediatrician that has to do the referral review. The fact that insurance company mandates that the referral review must be performed by a licensed nurse and follow a byzantine process, of course, has nothing to do with the delay.

victor106• 2 years ago

according to a civil lawsuit against the hospital.

Shouldn't this be a criminal case?

ikiris• 2 years ago

Only if a prosecutor wants it to be.

onlypassingthru• 2 years ago

Only if the likelihood of guilt is beyond a reasonable doubt, which the DA may not want to try. In civil suits the bar is lower as it's only a requirement for a preponderance of evidence.

Odds are the hospital will settle this out of court for an undisclosed sum because they can't realistically have their records on the matter brought to light. Was it medical malpractice?! We'll never know.

mrguyorama3• 2 years ago

Odds are the hospital will settle this out of court for an undisclosed sum because they can't realistically have their records on the matter brought to light

IMO it should not be legally possible to settle something this dire out of court. You shouldn't be able to bury anything simply by paying a large sum.

bpodgursky• 2 years ago

What specific criminal laws are you suggesting were broken?

Obviously a lot of crap happened here but there's not a legal obligation to be helpful to next-of-kin. Suing for vague "damages" is going to be far more productive.

RoyalHenOil4• 2 years ago

Taking her remains without the knowledge and consent of her next of kin is surely illegal. If I put a corpse in a warehouse for a year while the family was begging me to tell them where their loved one was, I would expect to face criminal negligence charges at the least.

burnished• 2 years ago

I think those are orthogonal. If I wrong you I can be brought up on criminal charges, and independently, you can sue for damages.

maronato• 2 years ago

This is very sad. My condolences to the family. Reading the timeline, I can’t help but speculate that there’s a darker side to this.

Two days before “checking out”, the daughter called the mom to say she was better and was about to leave. Soon after that, something bad happens (possibly malpractice) and she dies. An autopsy would reveal the true cause of death, so the hospital quietly ships her to an off-site morgue, doesn’t even fill a death certificate, and fabricates her checking out.

Now the body is beyond decomposed and an autopsy is impossible. The hospital claims it was a simple mix-up and gets away with a bit of bad press and a negligence charge.

polartx2• 2 years ago

I was reading something recently about pleading the fifth, (like if someone at the hospital was called to testify), I read that in criminal cases, pleading the fifth could not be used against the defendant. However in civil cases, jurors are instructed to assume their refusal to testify would implicate their guilt. I didn’t verify what I read, so take it with a grain of salt.

consp• 2 years ago

It says she was taken in due to a diabetic episode.

What on earth is that? Hypo/hyperglycaemia? You'd have to have extremely poorly managed type 1 diabetes for that to become fatal without a massive screwup at that age.

GuinansEyebrows• 2 years ago

this sounds very close to victim blaming in a country where insulin is not considered a human right, let alone the fact that many people in America only effectively have access to human insulin instead of analogs with higher efficacy and shorter absorption time. also people can develop t1d well into adulthood. we don’t have any information about this persons life nor should we need any.

this event is just one more reason i’m terrified to be diabetic in this country.

honestly the way you posed this question is awful and I invite you to reconsider your intent. hopefully the benefit of my doubt is not misplaced.

theparanoid• 2 years ago

My classmate from nursing school is an RN at that hospital, I'm not surprised.

If this happened in any of the majour european countries we would have that news in the headlines of newspapers and newscasts for several days. How come that is not the same in the US even more so given that the health sector is mostly privatized and therefore "should be" more efficient ( when in fact is clear that it is a complete failure compared to European standards) ? .

snowpid• 2 years ago

I think it is worth pointing out that many European health systems do have strong private elements (e.g. most of them pay pharma companies for making medicine) and NHS in the UK as a goverment focused health system is still quiet bad compared to other European countries.

But to your original question: As you are hanging around these website, I notice (and you too maybe), that even the most educated Americans have an "only American" world view. They consider it is the best country in the world anyway and don't care about other parts of the world.

In German news on German problems (e.g. Digitalisation) journalist sometimes point other countries as a positive example or role model (here Estonia or rarely Ukraine). On American problems it does not happen and we (as a I assume you live on my site of the Atlantic) just nodding our head why it does not change. It would need to change a deeply entrenced attitude. On this discussion page here they dont discuss how other countries do it. Not a single example how to make it better. Because the US is on the top of the hill anyway.

RoyalHenOil4• 2 years ago

I am an American and have lived most of my life in the US, but I have lived overseas for the last 12 years.

My experience is that Americans are very insular and do not know much about other countries because American-owned new media focuses on US stories, most major social media sites are American-owned and overwhelmingly populated with other Americans, etc.

Americans are insulated simply because the information sectors they have access to are dominated by American businesses. Hell, even the Internet itself is American. (This is the same reason that non-American countries are also overwhelmed by American issues/news/culture.)

It is not because Americans think they are superior, and it does not cause Americans to think they are superior. Degree of insulation and sense of superiority are independent variables, and Americans (especially middle-aged and younger) are actually quite low on the sense-of-superiority scale — certainly way, way lower than most Europeans in my experience. (This is not intended as a slight against Europeans; you have very good reasons to prefer Europe to the US.)

Every American I know has serious complaints about the US and is acutely aware that other countries leave the US in the dust in several of areas, including (though certainly not limited to) healthcare. There are of course some nationalist extremists out there who will argue otherwise, and they can be especially noisy on the internet because that is the nature of extremists, but these are not the average people you meet walking down an American street.

Most Americans may not know the ins and outs of other countries' healthcare systems, and therefore may not speak in any detail about those systems on American media sites like this one, but that isn't because they think theirs is the best. They may not ponder the ways that Estonia or Germany has the better healthcare system, but that's because they would be over the moon for anything half as good as either of them.

The USA's political flaws unfortunately run very deep and are in no way the fault of the modern American people. The US Constitution is a very old, very hard-to-change document that was designed primarily to make the US government as stable as possible — at the cost of responsiveness to democratic will.

Basically all of the genuine democracies (I am not talking about dictatorships that larp as democracies) created after American democracy were designed to correct the flaws of the US Constitution: the first-past-the-post voting system, the extreme difficulty of adding amendments, etc. That's why they have nice things.

BodyCulture• 2 years ago

I recently had an opportunity to learn something about software used in hospitals and it was a shock. Are you laughing about the JS or web developer meme as a symbol for clueless people? Well, I need to tell you that every JS or web dev is a code guru compared to the guys I have seen in medical / hospital software.

While your web dev has a very good idea about infrastructure and code maintenance these guys are usually clueless about CI, git, secrets management etc. but still they now all want to migrate their stuff to azure, because it’s cool… to say the truth I didn’t understand the reason why they want to. People that are basically relying on Microsoft wizard based development.

Shocking was that this was not only some bureaucracy software, but systems that are used for actual operations and patient management.

I guess that many people died already because windows developers but nobody did a systematic investigation so we don’t know.

blcknight• 2 years ago

I hope they get awarded 100x what they’re asking for.

louthy• 2 years ago

I can’t be the only person that thought about the Arrested Development ‘literal doctor’ [1] when reading the headline?

[1] https://youtu.be/0BUBd9dQvtY

fallinghawks• 2 years ago

My neighbor, who has bipolar mania, was in the hospital for a 72-hour hold. She wanted to leave, naturally, and a "patient advocate" made it happen "against the doctor's orders." So I'm trying to figure out how the choices of someone who cannot soundly judge their own condition take priority over that of the doctor in charge of them.

US hospital told family their daughter had checked out when in fact she'd died

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