After a lengthy search, UCI on March 1 hired Dr. Zeev Kain, executive vice chairman of anesthesiology at Yale, as chairman of the renamed department of anesthesiology and perioperative care.
He hired six new faculty members, purchased more than $4 million in operating room equipment and monitors and insisted that the hospital install a new electronic anesthesia information monitoring system. It was the only one of its kind in Orange County and eliminates the opportunity to fill out records in advance.
"I want to clear the air," Kain said Thursday. "Yes, there was a troubled department. It's naive not to say that. . . . I was brought to clean up things, and I've cleaned up a lot of it already. . . . This is fixed. There's just nothing else to say."
Kain said that when he arrived, he could predict the issues that would be raised by federal regulators. Quality assurance and safety problems have been fixed, along with staffing issues, he said. And staff members have all signed a zero-tolerance policy: If they falsify records, they face termination.
"We are actually auditing all the charts ourselves," Kain said. "I want to make sure everything is kosher."
The federal inspection is the latest problem for the medical center, which has suffered high-profile scandals over the last 13 years. In 2005, the hospital shut down its liver transplant program after Medicare funding was withdrawn. The action came after The Times reported that 32 people died awaiting livers in 2004 and 2005, even as doctors turned down organs that later were successfully transplanted elsewhere.
In 1999 and 2000, the university's Willed Body Program came under fire after its director sold parts of cadavers and did unauthorized autopsies. And in 1995, a team of fertility doctors at the school's Center for Reproductive Health were accused of stealing patients' eggs or embryos and implanting them in other patients without permission. Some of the women gave birth.
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kimi.yoshino@latimes.com
