Whistleblower Exposes Fatal Cover Up

"I am writing you because there is some information that was not shared with you in regards to the death of your husband," the letter began.

The writer told Joann Schneider that her husband was supposed to have received an antibiotic every day after he was transferred to Masonic Homes of Kentucky from a hospital on March 22, 2013, to recover from a hip infection. He didn't get a single dose.

"Mr. Schneider never received any antibiotic medication," the writer said.

And there was more. The writer said the home’s director of nursing and assistant director of nursing both "knew this but failed to report it to the proper authorities. It is not acceptable that this information was withheld from the family."

At first, Joann Schneider thought the whistleblower’s note was some kind of cruel joke, said Josh Schneider, one of her two sons.

"As we later learned, it was all true and far worse than we could have imagined," he said.

The family’s quest for the truth about Dan Schneider's death at age 68 culminated last month when Masonic Homes of Kentucky agreed to pay $11 million to settle claims that it "literally allowed him to infect away," as the Schneiders claimed in their suit.

The nursing home company agreed to the payment on the eve of trial, the day after a judge overruled its motion to keep the letter from the jury. Med Care, a pharmacy supplier, agreed to pay an additional $1.9 million to Joann, Josh and Jed Schneider.

A spokeswoman for Masonic Homes said after the accord was announced that Schneider’s maltreatment was "an isolated incident."

But federal investigators found half a dozen violations that put residents "in immediate jeopardy to health and safety," including medication errors involving Schneider and multiple residents that were "likely to cause serious injury, harm, impairment or death."

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid fined Masonic Homes $635,600, the largest amount in Kentucky in 2013, a penalty reduced to $413,000 when the facility waived its right to appeal.

'Cover-up' hid a host of problems

Records from that investigation and the lawsuit depict a frightening series of medication transcription errors by nurses, supervisors who failed to catch them, and managers who refused to report them, as the law requires, to the government and Schneider’s family.

The records show:

Thirteen nurses wrote in Schneider’s chart that he was getting intravenous antibiotics daily, even though he never got a single dose.

Ten days after her husband's admission, Joann Schneider asked during a care meeting how he was getting the antibiotic, having never seen him with an IV line. A note in a summary of the meeting mentioned the need to check on his antibiotic. No one did.

When Dan Schneider was about to be transferred to Norton Suburban Hospital after 24 days at the Masonic Homes because his health had declined so dramatically — and a nurse finally realized the antibiotics error — the director of nursing, Michelle Lee, instructed that the information should not be shared with the hospital. Lee later said she wanted to complete an internal investigation first, to confirm the mistake had been made.

Responding to questions from the Courier Journal, the Masonic Homes' attorney, Darryl Durham, acknowledged in an email that "we did make some mistakes" and that "such errors in a health care setting can, at times, have serious consequences."

He said officials did not report the mistakes to the state because there was a "difference of opinion" on whether that was required, though now "we acknowledge it should have been reported."

And Durham said it was an isolated event in the context of "the thousands of medications that are administered on a daily basis at a nursing center like Masonic Homes," which has facilities in Shelbyville and Northern Kentucky as well as Louisville.

But Chad Gardner, who represented the Schneider family, described it as a "sad, scary case" — especially given "how close they came to getting away with it."

He said the errors likely never would have been discovered if not for the whistleblower, who presumably was a Masonic Homes employee. Gardner confirmed it was a woman but declined to identify her or say if she still works at Masonic Homes, or if she ever did.

Durham said the nursing home doesn’t know who she was.

Messenger-Inquirer
To read this article in its entirety CLICK HERE.