Thread by @LaurenWeberHP

🚨 Hospitals with high rates of covid patients who didn’t have the diagnosis when they were admitted have rarely been held accountable due to multiple gaps in government oversight, my & @By_CJewett investigation found.

A 🧵 for @KHNews @USATODAY

khn.org/news/article/a…

.@CMSGov urged private accreditors — which almost 90% of hospitals pay for oversight — to do targeted infection-control inspections as covid began to sweep the country last March.

They said no.

usatoday.com/story/news/nat…

Government inspectors went into nearly every nursing home last year, @HealthcareSeema told us.

That the same couldn’t be done for hospitals reveals a problem, she said.

“We didn’t have the authority,” @HealthcareSeema said. “This is something to be corrected.”

Meet Judi Evans -- the soap actress was taken to Riverside Community Hospital after a horseback riding accident last May.

She was wheeled around the hospital maskless and placed feet from a screaming covid patient.

A week into her stay, she says she tested positive for covid.

She left the hospital with over $1 million in bills from a month-long stay — and her legs, thankfully, after she was told they may have to be amputated.

She said she still suffers from long-covid symptoms and is haunted by the screams of fellow patients in the covid ward.

Watch Judi detail her covid struggles here, in a video by the fabulous @heidi_demarco who is also behind the beautifully compassionate visuals:

Riverside holds The Gold Seal of Approval from its private accreditor, the Joint Commission, which last inspected the hospital on-site in May 2018 before going in on Nov. 19 this year.

It also is being sued on behalf of some staff, who called it a "public nuisance."

Data analyzed for @KHNews from April through September of last year shows at Riverside Community Hospital, 4% of the covid Medicare patients were diagnosed after admission — more than double the national average.

At 38 other hospitals, that rate was 5% or higher.

Riverside spokesperson David Maxfield said “Based on contact tracing, outlined by the CDC and other infectious disease experts, there is no evidence to suggest the risk of transmission at our hospital is different than what you would find at other hospitals."

.@By_CJewett previously found at least 10,000 people tested positive for covid in the hospital after being admitted for something else last year in the first story of the series:

usatoday.com/story/news/nat…

We dug in, and found that federal inspectors found infection-control issues at 8 of the 38 hospitals with rates of 5% of higher of covid Medicare patients who tested positive after admission.

We found that even when state inspectors in California assessed hospitals with high rates of covid diagnosed after admission, they identified few shortcomings.

“The American public thinks someone is watching over them,” said Lisa McGiffert of the Patient Safety Action Network

“Generally they think someone’s in charge and going to make sure bad things don’t happen. Our oversight system in our country is so broken and so untrustworthy.”

You can read the whole story below.

Our final piece in the series goes live tomorrow.

khn.org/news/article/a…