In the Courts: Facility Argues It Returned to Compliance in Five Days but Offers Insufficient Proof

​In an administrative law case in which a skilled nursing facility maintained that it returned to compliance long before the revisit survey, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has affirmed a civil monetary penalty totaling $15,400 against the facility. The opinion is an unpublished opinion and thus is not to be treated as legal precedent.

A routine survey identified a total of 12 deficiencies. The court focused on two: failure to provide care to a resident with obvious signs of respiratory distress less than an hour after a physician had ordered that staff keep a close watch on the resident and failure to remove a painful urinary catheter until long after it had ceased to be medically necessary. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) imposed a civil monetary penalty of $550 per day; it lifted the penalty effective the day before the revisit survey. The penalty, covering the 28-day...