By Elizabeth Miller
The Cleveland Clinic owes $769,000 in fines because of problems at its Marymount Hospital laboratory. That financial penalty has been building since June when the lab was cited for problems that put its patients in “immediate jeopardy.” Those problems have been corrected.
For more than two months, patients at Marymount have had to go to other Cleveland Clinic facilities for blood and urine tests. That will soon end. On Wednesday, conditions at Marymount were deemed acceptable according to a letter from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS.
A validation survey conducted by CMS earlier this year discovered several safety violations including failure to ensure safe temperatures for blood returning to the lab. The lab’s director was fired as a result of the citations, as well as a couple of employees who did not follow procedures correctly. The lab closed in September.
Now, with the “all-clear” from CMS, Dr. J. Stephen Jones, head of Cleveland Clinic Regional Hospitals and leader of the Marymount project, says he and the lab’s director are discussing when to reopen the facility.
“We want to be very thoughtful on it," Jones says.
"We’ve got everybody trained up, and we’re ready to move that in a phased approach.”
Jones says doctors stopped conducting a couple of operations at Marymount, but they’ll resume once the lab reopens.