Hospital Will Resume Blood Tests

Health authorities approved a hospital’s plan to resume blood-clotting tests Friday and attributed a third death to errors that had been made in the hospital’s laboratory.

A 78-year-old woman died Aug. 26 from bleeding on the brain because of drug therapy based on the lab error that caused two other deaths, said Jeff Moran, spokesman for the city medical examiner.

The patients were among dozens at St. Agnes Medical Center given overdoses of a blood thinner after a laboratory incorrectly interpreted a blood-thickness test. The mistakes occurred between June 5 and July 25.

The hospital voluntarily stopped doing the test soon after the errors were discovered and sent the work to an outside lab.

St. Agnes has improved its ordering process and instituted checks and balances to ensure that what the hospital received was what it ordered, a spokesman for the state health department said.