Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

20 PATIENT SAFETY & OUTCOMES South Carolina organ network tied to fatal blood- type error under investigation, pressure to improve By Gabrielle Masson W e Are Sharing Hope SC is facing three lawsuits aer physicians unknowingly gave three patients organs with incompatible blood types, e Post and Courier reported June 6. On Nov. 28, 2018, medical teams in Charlotte, N.C., Charleston, S.C., and Nashville, Tenn., rushed to save the three patients. Two recipients — Ykeiah Law- rence and Joe Patterson — survived after second transplants, while Allen Holliman died at Charleston-based Medical Uni- versity of South Carolina when he got the wrong lungs. Mr. Patterson, Ms. Lawrence and Mr. Holliman's wife all filed lawsuits against North Charleston-based nonprofit We Are Sharing Hope SC. e lawsuits allege that the organization didn't complete the two required tests to confirm a donor's blood type before their organs were matched to patients and shipped. Ms. Lawrence's lawsuit also lists Char- lotte-based Atrium Health — the system that operates the hospital where Ms. Law- rence was treated — as a defendant. e system declined comment, according to e Post and Courier. Organ procurement organizations recover or- gans and distribute them to waiting patients; part of their job is to secure blood tests to make sure organs and patients match. In November 2020, CMS overhauled how success would be measured for these orga- nizations, all of which are nonprofits that work under guaranteed regional monopo- lies. If every organization reaches the new goals, between 5,600 and 7,300 additional organ transplants could occur annually, according to CMS. Under the new federal rule, organizations with poor scores that don't show improvement by 2026 could lose their government contracts. In December 2020, a U.S. House oversight committee launched an investigation into potential "poor performance, waste and mismanagement" at We Are Sharing Hope SC and 10 other similar organizations. David DeStefano, president and CEO of We Are Sharing Hope SC, declined to comment on the pending lawsuits, according to e Post and Courier. However, Mr. DeStefano said he welcomes the new CMS metrics, and organizational improvements have been made since 2018. He said the nonprof- it facilitated more donations in 2020 than any other year and is on track to meet the new goals. n 1 in 7 patients require care for new condition after COVID-19 By Mackenzie Bean A bout 1 in 7 adults with COVID-19 developed a new health issue that required medical care after recov- ering from the illness last year, according to a study published May 19 in The BMJ. Researchers analyzed claims data for 266,586 U.S. adults di- agnosed with COVID-19 between Jan. 1 and Oct. 31, 2020. They found 14 percent of adults were diagnosed with at least one of 50 new health conditions within six months of their initial infection. This figure was 5 percent higher than a com- parative group of U.S. adults who did not have COVID-19, and 1.65 percent higher than adults with a viral lower respi- ratory tract infection. New conditions COVID-19 survivors developed included chronic respiratory failure, heart rhythm problems, amnesia, diabetes, anxiety and fatigue. "With almost 70 million individuals infected with SARS- CoV-2 worldwide and rising, the number of survivors with potential sequelae after COVID-19 will continue to grow," re- searchers said. "To manage these patients effectively, under- standing the incidence and natural history of these sequelae is important." n Ear tubes don't prevent future infection, study suggests By Erica Carbajal T ympanostomy, or ear tubes, did not lower the rate of acute otitis media, or middle-ear infec- tions, among children, compared to antibiotics, according to research published May 13 in The New England Journal of Medicine. The study involved 250 children between the ages of 6 months and 35 months who had at least three bouts of middle-ear infections within six months, or at least four infections within a year. Researchers randomly assigned the children to ei- ther undergo tympanostomy-tube replacement, or receive antibiotics. Across the two-year study, children who received the ear tubes had an average recurrent infection rate of about 1.5, compared to about 1.7 among those who were treated with antibiotics. There was also no sig- nificant difference in how severe recurrent infections were, findings showed. "The rate of episodes of acute otitis media during a 2-year period was not significantly lower with tympa- nostomy-tube placement than with medical manage- ment," researchers concluded. n

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