Brookwood hospital to continue Medicaid, Medicare participation
Brookwood Baptist Health hospital will continue to participate in Medicaid and Medicare funding programs, which was announced Thursday night after coming under review by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for noncompliance.
The hospital has been under scrutiny after a patient death in April, and CMS regulators declared it to be out of compliance with federal regulations on Wednesday. The regulators had given an Aug. 9 deadline for Brookwood to address patient care issues before the possibility of being removed from the Medicare and Medicaid funding program.
Regulators conducted a follow up survey on Wednesday and accepted the hospital's plans for improvements to care issues. This work will be ongoing, but it removes the immediate danger of Brookwood losing that funding.
"I am proud that our team was able to successfully make the organizational and procedural changes required. Going forward, we will continue to work with our governing agencies, including CMS and the Alabama Department of Public Health, to demonstrate our unwavering commitment to patient safety and implementation of our corrective actions," Brookwood CEO Keith Parrott said, adding that Brookwood will be surveyed again in the future to ensure it will be in compliance.
Brookwood Communications Manager Laura Clark said the work that must be done at the hospital includes addressing safety issues in the behavioral health partial hospitalization program and decentralization of the cardiac telemetry program to monitor patient heart rates.
"In addition to enhancing our policies and procedures, providing additional staff education and implementing new auditing tools, we now have telemetry monitoring located on each of the designated telemetry units," Clark said via email on Friday, Aug. 10. "We have also begun work to create more space for our behavioral health partial hospitalization program."
The Brookwood Baptist website has an alert advising Medicare and Medicaid patients to call 877-5449 with questions about upcoming appointments or procedures.