EMTALA Violations

Excerpted from Modern Healthcare:

Four hospitals and health systems collectively paid $105,000 to settle alleged violations of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act with HHS' inspector general, Modern Healthcare has learned.

Florida Hospital Heartland Medical Center, a 186-bed hospital located in Sebring, and owned by the Winter Park, Fla.-based Adventist Health System Sunbelt Health Care Corp., paid $20,000 for allegedly failing to provide appropriate medical screening and stabilization to a 21-year-old patient three times over a 12-day period. The patient later died of a rare and difficult-to-diagnose parasitic infection. The University of Alabama at Birmingham paid $40,000 to settle allegations that in September 2000 a member of the ER staff at its 226-bed UAB Medical West failed to provide a complete screening to a woman suffering from kidney infections and associated fevers and chills.