Accreditors have suspended mammography services at one Louisiana hospital after discovering “serious image quality deficiencies,” the Food and Drug Administration announced Friday.
It was back in April that the American College of Radiology alerted the FDA of concerns found at St. Bernard Parish Hospital, located in the community of Chalmette. An Additional Mammography Review of exams at the facility, conducted by the ACR, found that 29 of 30 cases examined did not meet the college’s criteria for clinical image quality.
Following the discovery, ACR revoked St. Bernard’s accreditation in May, while the FDA yanked its Mammography Quality Standards Act certificate until further notice.
“Based on the serious image quality deficiencies noted during the AMR, the FDA declared the mammography performed at this facility to be a serious risk to human health, and therefore required the facility to perform a Patient and Referring Healthcare Provider Notification to alert all at-risk patients and their providers of the mammography quality problems at the facility,” the agency said in a Sept. 11 announcement.
The hospital—which is part of the larger 40-hospital Ochsner Health—completed the notification process last month. But as of Friday, it had not yet applied for reinstatement of its mammography accreditation and is currently not authorized to deliver such imaging, the FDA said.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.