The public believes that hospitals are strictly inspected for patient safety, but our analysis of at one major national health center calls into question whether government officials have strong-enough tools for enforcement when patients are injured. Our analysis found that the Cleveland Clinic spent 19 months during a four-year period under direct threat of being kicked out of Medicare. The threat was never carried out. That’s despite alarming findings by inspectors, including: a series of six operating-room fires in an 11-month span; the CEO’s admission that robotic-surgery patients were sometimes not informed that doctor did robotically assisted procedures on them; a physician-credentialing system so rife with holes that the hospital’s own chief medical officer was not credentialed. Experts told us that individual violations can happen at any hospital, but it was the repetition of the same types of issues, and long stretches of time it take to resolve them, that are more concerning.
