covering up for the a-hole md who didn't check the nurse's notes and put presbyterian's bottom line over patient-zero's well-being...,

newsmax |  Dallas doctors apparently never saw a nurse's note that an emergency room patient with fever and pains had recently been in Africa, and he was released into the community while infected with deadly Ebola.

It remains unclear why, despite the hospital's attempt at an explanation Friday. Early in the day, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital said in a statement that a nurse's notes on the infected patient, Thomas Eric Duncan, were contained in records that a physician wouldn't see. Friday night, a spokesman for the institution said that wasn't so.

"We would like to clarify a point made in the statement released earlier," Wendell Watson, a spokesman for the hospital, wrote in an e-mail. "As a standard part of the nursing process, the patient's travel history was documented and available to the full care team in the electronic health record (EHR), including within the physician's workflow."

There "was no flaw in the EHR in the way the physician and nursing portions interacted related to this event," Watson said.

The changing message came after the hospital faced criticism from other medical professionals about the actions taken prior to the patient's release. Ashish Jha, a health policy professor at Harvard University's School of Public Health in Boston, said no matter what, the doctor responsible should have double-checked the man's travel history before he was sent back out into the community.

‘Logic Flaws' 

"There are so many flaws in the logic of ‘The EMR system made us to do it,'" Jha said in a telephone interview Friday, referring to the hospital's initial statement. "When a patient walks in the ER with a fever, the standard question is ‘Have you traveled?' I don't understand why that question wasn't asked by the physician."

Two days after being released, Duncan returned in an ambulance to the Dallas hospital, was placed in isolation and subsequently confirmed as having the deadly disease.

Wendell Watson, a spokesman for the hospital, said earlier Friday that the hospital had wrongly designed its digital record system so not all of a nurse's notes are visible to doctors. Its not clear from the clarification sent to media just before midnight what actually happened.