ASHEVILLE, N.C. — At around 2 a.m., 7-year-old twin brothers arrived at Mission Hospital in Asheville. Both had a fever, a cough, a rash, pink eye, and cold symptoms.
The boys sat in one waiting room and then another. Two hours and 20 minutes passed before the two were isolated, according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services records obtained by KFF Health News. Then two more hours ticked by.
As the sun rose, an emergency room doctor called the state epidemiologist and described the symptoms. The public health official told him to keep the kids in the hospital and quarantine them. Shortly after that call, the patients were diagnosed.
It was measles.
Hospital staff gave the father instructions on how to quarantine the family and sent them home.
The virus exposed at least 26 other people in the hospital that January day, federal investigators determined. Health inspectors for CMS investigated the measles infections and other failures in care and concluded that the twins’ symptoms should have triggered an isolation procedure for which Mission Hospital staffers had trained seven months earlier. CMS designated Mission in “Immediate Jeopardy” for the exposures and other unrelated issues, one of the most severe sanctions a hospital can face, threatening to pull federal funding unless it remedied the problems.
A spokesperson for Mission said its staff was trained to manage airborne sickness and is following federal rules.
As U.S. hospitals face an increasing risk of encountering measles, and pressure to immediately spot it, health care workers face an unusual barrier: Many don’t k …