Hospital Averts Cutoff of Medicare Funding

Federal health officials on Tuesday announced that St. John’s Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica has averted a threatened cutoff of $37 million in Medicare funds stemming from an incident in which the hospital turned away an elderly woman suffering from a brain injury.

U.S. Health Care Financing Administration officials said that a recent inspection of the facility’s emergency room found that “the procedures to avoid such an incident in the future are comfortably in place.” The agency had threated to shut off Medicare funding by today unless problems were corrected.

Hospital officials said the incident was triggered by poor communication between an ambulance crew and a hospital nurse. The nurse told the ambulance drivers that St. John’s could not accept the patient but failed to inform them that it was because the hospital’s CAT scan machine, which is used to diagnose brain disorders, was not working.