US hospital told family their daughter had checked out when in fact she'd died

I had a cousin who voluntarily checked himself into the hospital related to severe withdrawal symptoms (and had bouts of psychosis related to said with withdrawal - meth addictions are nasty). His mother stayed for awhile but had to leave for work. She was repeatedly guaranteed by multiple doctors and nurses that he could not check himself out and would be there for several days at least. They told her to come back the next morning.

Late that night, he was discharged. Not even "he checked himself out". The hospital discharged him (and that's over an hour ride away from home, btw - no hospitals in rural areas these days).

He had no phone and no wallet. According to staff, he tried to call his mother to pick him up, but couldn't remember her cell phone number (it had changed recently). He called his sister and left a message, but she was traveling and didn't get it until much later. According to the hospital, he tried to call several different numbers trying to get a ride home and they made him stop and made him leave. In a quite rough downtown area he was not familiar with. While clearly not in his right mind. At 2am. With no wallet, no phone, no nothing.

The hospital had his mother's contact info. They did not give it to him even when he requested it. They did not attempt to contact her in any way.

We still don't know what happened afterwards. His body was found four days later in the river and it had been there for awhile.

Forcibly discharging someone under those circumstances and refusing to even contact their emergency contacts is beyond belief. I'm furious about it. Apparently it's common and not even something there's any recourse for.

This crosses into criminal liability.

A couple of years ago I climbed Mt Whitney in California. One of the climbers that day was from the east coast and failed to show up for work a few days later. The family became concerned and called the car rental agency in Las Vegas where he flew to and rented his car. The agency said the car had been returned. After another day of him missing they called the car rental agency again to confirm and once again the agency said the car was in the lot. The next day the rangers found the car was still parked in the Mt Whitney parking lot and search and rescue was finally dispatched.

In this case I believe it didn't make a difference because the climber appeared to die from acute injury on the mountain the day of his climb but in another scenario maybe those 2 days would've been the difference between being rescued or dying from exposure.

The article is so much worse and the headline buries the lede. I would be horrified. My condolences to the family.

Two days before “checking out”, the daughter called the mom to say she was better and was about to leave. Soon after that, something bad happens (possibly malpractice) and she dies. An autopsy would reveal the true cause of death, so the hospital quietly ships her to an off-site morgue, doesn’t even fill a death certificate, and fabricates her checking out.

Now the body is beyond decomposed and an autopsy is impossible. The hospital claims it was a simple mix-up and gets away with a bit of bad press and a negligence charge.

It appears they need a name change after this lawsuit

Despite the misconduct, I think saving people's lives is the most fundamental duty of a hospital.

To put it another way, clearly the outcome in this story was unacceptable, but what was the correct outcome?

While your web dev has a very good idea about infrastructure and code maintenance these guys are usually clueless about CI, git, secrets management etc. but still they now all want to migrate their stuff to azure, because it’s cool… to say the truth I didn’t understand the reason why they want to. People that are basically relying on Microsoft wizard based development.

Shocking was that this was not only some bureaucracy software, but systems that are used for actual operations and patient management.

I guess that many people died already because windows developers but nobody did a systematic investigation so we don’t know.

[1] https://youtu.be/0BUBd9dQvtY

Shouldn't this be a criminal case?

What on earth is that? Hypo/hyperglycaemia? You'd have to have extremely poorly managed type 1 diabetes for that to become fatal without a massive screwup at that age.