Dallas hospital alters account, raising questions on Ebola case
Manny Fernandez, Michael D. Shear and Abby Goodnough
NYTimes.com
Oct. 4,2014
DALLAS—Health officials’ handling of the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States continued to raise questions Friday, after the hospital that is treating the patient and that mistakenly sent him home when he first came to its emergency room acknowledged that both the nurses and the doctors in that initial visit had access to the fact that he had arrived from Liberia.
For reasons that remain unclear, nurses and doctors failed to act on that information, and released the patient under the erroneous belief that he had a low-grade fever from a viral infection, allowing him to put others at risk of contracting Ebola. Those exposed included several schoolchildren, and the exposure has the potential to spread a disease in Dallas that has already killed more than 3,000 people in Africa.
On Thursday, the hospital, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, released a statement essentially blaming a flaw in its electronic health records system for its decision to send the patient—Thomas E. Duncan, a Liberian national visiting his girlfriend and relatives in the United States—home the first time he visited its emergency room, Sept. 25. It said there were separate ”workflows” for doctors and nurses in the records so the doctors did not receive the information that he had come from Africa.
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