Death By Deletion Or Misunderstanding?

Adventist Health Care, Cerner and An Accusation of Death By Deletion

Patricia Moleski claims death by deletion.

By Phil L. Opeiam for CPW News Service

     When a Florida medical records supervisor refused to delete hospital records where she worked for Adventist Health Systems, a not-for-profit health care organization of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, she eventually lost her job.

     Her on-line video has made her case available to the world and legal experts and medical care analysts have given her testimony close scrutiny.

     “I have a problem with anyone who starts out claiming that they are a Christian who wanted to do their Christian duty only to find out that the hospital is doing everything it can to limit its exposure to liability.  How can you continue to run a hospital if a little error here or there or a little oversight every now and then opens the entire hospital system to a massive financial liability?” asked hospital consultant with HHH Partners LLC, George Sievers, of Boston, Massachusetts.

    Patty Moleski claims that it was more than a “little oversight”.  When a patient with no family was given what Mrs. Moleski claims was an overdose of a psychotropic drug, he jumped from the 7^th floor of the hospital’s parking garage.  Unable to  walk to the ER for additional treatment and pronounced dead at the scene, the hospital, she says, evaporated one record and replaced it with a record showing that the man went AMA, a technical term for “against medical advice”, and that  he left the hospital of his own accord.  Without saying it, Moleski claims that the patient did not leave on his own, but was following whatever voices the improper dosing, now hidden from the computerized records, was telling him.

    In another incident, Mrs. Moleski claims that a baby’s prescribed vitamin K injection, a routine for newborns, was recorded by an Adventist Hospital RN in her Cerner computer program, but the program failed to record the entry and that a second dosing caused the infant’s death.

     “There is no indication that a double dosing of vitamin K is an automatic overdosing,” said one pharmacology consultant who desired to remain anonymous.

   “I am sure that whatever records were submitted to the Cerner program are still there somewhere and cannot be totally erased.  People need to be more trusting of authority figures in their lives.  This is the result of an erosion of disciplined thinking and a callous disregard of following the dictates of the system, albeit a religious organization, that was kind enough to give Mrs. Moleski a job shredding and shedding records,” said Sister Sylvia Goebbels, of the Sisters of the Holy Novices, a religious order known for its loyalty and devotion to faithful service and unquestioned submission to authority.  

    John Hammersmith, an analyst for The Center for The Study of Deviant Record Keeping in Silver Springs, Maryland and a former CPA for Arthur Anderson assigned to Enron before its collapse, said “Before my religious conversion I, too, believed as Sister Goebbels, that records cannot be erased and that they always leave an electronic signature, but of course the 2000 presidential election in the state of Florida where Mrs. Moleski is making her claim is also the home of Governor Richard Scott, whose hospital system received the biggest Medicare-Medicaid fraud fine in U.S. history at $1.7 billion dollars.  The investigation into the computer voting machines in that state suggest that computers can make excellent black holes for the very short-term storage of unwanted records.  Mrs. Moleski should ask the Governor to give his opinion in her case.  She could also ask Mr. Patterson the CEO of Cerner.  Admittedly his company hires very young people just out of college who often complain that they can never quite tell just what their work is contributing to the overall mission of the company and of their individual work units….kind of like how Josiah Wedgewood and Henry Ford kept workers in the dark about their production processes, but, hey, this is how capitalism works,” said Mr. Hammersmith.  Hammersmith also noted the Congressional testimony of Clint Curtis the NASA and Exxonmobil computer engineer who provided computer "vote flipping" software in the 2000 Presidential elections as well as the HBO documentary Hacking Democracy which chronicled the problems with Diebold's voter machines. 

     Neal L. Patterson, CEO of Cerner, found his stock dropping by 20% in three days after news of an email he had sent to employees stating that the parking lot of the Kansas City company would be the yardstick of the company’s success indicating that it should be “substantially full at 7:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.” and that it should be “half full on Saturdays.”

    “Bye-bye any thought of a forty hour work week,” said Hammersmith.  “But more importantly is the fact that there are so few long-term employees.  That means that the turnover is high….a good thing if institutional memory is, like a pesky medical record, a liability issue.”  In addition, Hammersmith was concerned that on July 23, 2012 the entire Cerner system went down for six hours leaving many hospitals and physicians flying bind and nurses scurrying to recreate patient records from memory.  "The Cerner system crash this past summer is something that could happen to all remote hosting and cloud systems. As long as there's humans interfacing with machines you can have accidents and purposeful misuse," said Hammersmith citing a recent article on the Cerner crash.

     Hammersmith who watched the Moleski YouTube testimony said only “First, she needs to hear the lawyers summation in the movie The Verdict...heck, watch the whole movie.  She needs to better explain how the death of the infant was related to the hospital's risk management programs and how the loss of that record like the reported shredding or deleting of hard copies of RiskMaster documents were related.  Otherwise, it looks like the RN may have failed to record dosage and subsequent overdosing incident and blamed it on a computer glitch.  Did the RN keep any evidence of her record input or have a witness to her claim?  Then, Mrs. Moleski needs to trim her bangs, drop the eye shadow, quit leading with here religiosity, look straight into the camera, get the RN's, a CNA, a janitor who witnessed the events to join her in her next  case and video....or this one if the statute of limitation hasn't expired... and then really lower the boom with overwhelming force....kind of like the Army uses.  Otherwise, everything she said is totally possible given the Spanish Inquisition, Robert Tilton and Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, not to mention Nazi Dr. Joseph Mengele who was known to make his patients eat the records he wished to have disappear.”