Officials at Virginia Mason Medical Center didn’t report an outbreak of ‘superbug’ infections tied to tainted medical devices to a state adverse-event system designed to track and prevent such problems, a report finds.
Virginia Mason Medical Center failed to properly notify state health officials about an outbreak of so-called “superbug” infections tied to contaminated medical scopes, investigators have found.
The hospital, which detected 39 infections and 18 deaths linked to the outbreak between 2012 and 2014, did not file a required report with the state system that tracks dangerous and deadly adverse events.
“Failure to report an adverse event may result in unrecognized patterns of device-related events in multiple facilities,” said a state Department of Health complaint report released late last week.