The first man died in April 2014. Another died later that month. Then on July 18 of that year, a woman was rushed to a hospital where she was told she was lucky to be alive.
They all went to the same Little Rock, Ark., surgery center for a colonoscopy, among the safest procedures a patient can have. And each stopped breathing soon afterward, court records say, sustaining the same type of brain damage seen in a drowning victim.
What happened at Kanis Endoscopy Center prompted no review by officials in Arkansas, which, like 16 other states, has no mandate to report patient deaths after surgery center care. So no facility oversight authority has examined whether the deaths were a statistical anomaly or cause for alarm.
A Kaiser Health News and USA Today Network investigation found that surgery centers operate under such an uneven mix of rules across U.S. states that fatalities or serious injuries can result in no warning to government officials, much less to potential patients. The gaps in oversight enable centers hit with federal regulators’ toughest sanctions to keep operating, according to interviews, a review of hundreds of pages of court filings and government records obtained under open records laws. No rule stops a doctor exiled by a hospital for misconduct from opening a surgery center down the street.
Even the high-profile death of comedian Joan Rivers — who passed away in 2014 following a routine procedure at a Manhattan surgery center — failed to appear in Medicare’s public tally of patients rushed to a hospital.
When Faye Watkins, 63, walked into Kanis Endoscopy in Arkansas, she was unaware that there had been two deaths after care there within the previous three months, she said. She was in the fog of anesthesia when it struck her that something was amiss. She said she heard men say her blood pressure was falling.
“I said [to myself], ‘Lord, if it’s time for me to go, take me. But I’m not ready,’” Watkins recalled. Her next memory was waking up in a hospital with her chest sore from CPR.
The KHN/USA Today examination raises questions about the need for more robust oversight of surgery centers, where public access to important information, such as surgical outcome data, tends to be more limited than what’s available about hospitals. The gap persists even as the nation’s 5,600 surgery centers have surpassed hospitals in number and taken on increasingly complex procedures.
“It’s disgraceful that there’s so little information” about what happens in surgery centers, said Leah Binder, chief executive of the Leapfrog Group, an employer consortium that surveys more than 2,000 hospitals a year.
khn.org/news/lax-oversight-leaves-surgery-center-regulators-and-patients-in-the-dark/