Whistleblower Wants Tenet to Come Clean

Even Rosen, already jaded by his own experience with the broken sterilizers, expressed fresh outrage at the alleged conditions in Palm Beach.

"That's a disaster when you have a fly in the operating room," Rosen said. "If it lands on the wound, that's an instant infection."

Still, Rosen says the horror stories no longer surprise him.

"Based on what I know about Tenet," he said, "I wouldn't put anything past them."

Even so, Rosen blames federal authorities, who control the purse strings on so many big health care payouts, and not just Tenet for any resulting patient tragedies.

Dream Police

Reeling at the thought that patients had risked serious infections from contaminated equipment, Rosen promptly alerted the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations in May of 2000. He told federal inspectors that flash sterilizers in the operating room had repeatedly failed daily performance tests, that hospital administrators had intentionally concealed the malfunction from surgeons and that department staffers were now "sanitizing" records that would expose the equipment breakdown.

But Rosen, who cited employees who could corroborate his story, was in for a major shock. JCAHO, the industry watchdog known to growl about the smallest misplaced exit sign, ignored the chief of surgery and accepted the hospital's explanation instead.

"Here I am telling them about a major threat to patients -- and the blatant destruction of documents -- and they just basically blow me off," Rosen marveled this week. "They gave the hospital a rating of 93."

Rosen would later voice his discomfort in a letter to the JCAHO.

"It was a surprise that, given the independent confirmation of the deliberate withholding of medical information, that any explanation would be accepted by you without penalty to the hospital," he wrote. "I would hope that this is not becoming an issue of your organization's accountability and credibility."