Mar. 12, 2013 3:32 AM,
The only compounding pharmacy that shipped products to Vanderbilt University Medical Center turned out to be a lab that failed sterility safeguards, even though the hospital tried to check out its supplier.
Vanderbilt started retracing the supply line in November — the month after news broke that compounded drugs had caused a nationwide outbreak of fungal meningitis — but it didn’t finish the job. The origin of a product Vanderbilt used during heart transplants wound up being a lab in Chicago, not the Birmingham lab listed as the supplier. Vanderbilt did a site visit in Birmingham, but not Chicago.
“Even Vanderbilt has limited resources, and we chose not to visit that facility in Chicago,” Mark Sullivan, the hospital’s director of pharmacy inpatient services, told the Tennessee Board of Pharmacy in January.