Northside Hospital in St. Petersburg, Fla., part of Tampa, Fla.-based HCA West Florida, is facing a lawsuit alleging the hospital submitted false claims to Medicare and Medicaid, according to a Legal Newsline report.
The lawsuit was originally filed under the qui tam, or whistle-blower, provisions of the False Claims Act by Brenda Farnsworth, the hospital's vice president of quality and risk management, who was placed on administrative leave in February 2012 for alleged insubordination.
In her lawsuit, Ms. Farnsworth alleges Northside Hospital and HCA routinely billed government payers "for treatments made by interns and resident physicians even though a teaching physician was not present at the time the medical procedures were performed," according to the report.
The lawsuits specifically describes an instance in 2011 that involved a 44-year-old patient who died after vomiting 1.5 liters of blood and wasn't seen by a resident physician until four hours later. The resident physician was not supervised by a teaching physician when he tried to resuscitate the patient, and the patient died.
Colleen Carver, director of marketing and public relations at Northside Hospital issued a statement about the lawsuit saying, "Ms. Farnsworth filed a complaint containing susbtantially similar claims in 2012, and the government declined to pursue those claims after having over a year to investigate them. After we filed a Motion to Dismiss challenging all of her allegations, Ms. Farnsworth voluntarily dismissed her own case. More than one year later, she has now refiled the same allegations. We again tend to dispute these allegations and will defend ourselves vigorously."
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