QuickTake:

The Oregon State Hospital has been returned to its regular schedule of inspections, allowing it to continue billing for Medicare reimbursements. It’s status had been in jeopardy after violations of care and safety aroud to the death of Lane County patient Kenneth Hass in March 2025.

The federal government recently notified Oregon State Hospital that the facility is no longer at risk of losing its eligibility to participate in the reimbursement program that provides funding for Medicare patients.

Oregon State Hospital is back in a regular rotation of inspections and oversight, after federal surveyors previously found serious violations linked to the death of a patient from Lane County in March 2025.

The hospital released a Jan. 21 letter from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which told the state-run psychiatric hospital it is “rescinding the termination action.” The letter told Oregon State Hospital the facility is in “substantial compliance,” which returns it to the normal survey cycle.

This comes after federal inspectors found repeated violations of professional rules and standards for patient care and safety, including hospital staffers waiting more than 4 minutes to enter the seclusion room that held the Lane County patient, 25-year-old Kenneth Hass, after he was motionless on the floor. The failures “potentially contributed to (his) harm and death,” the federal report found. 

Since Hass’ death on March 18, 2025, Gov. Tina Kotek has fired the hospital’s interim superintendent and chief medical officer, Dr. Sara Walker. The hospital also put a corrective plan in place that calls for more training and reviews when patients are placed in seclusion.

Other steps include a video monitoring team to aid in-person assessments of patients in seclusion or restraints and improved coordination of treatment to prevent falls and placing patients in seclusion or restraints.

Shortly after the death, the federal agency placed the hospital in “immediate jeopardy,” due to the seriousness of the violations. That status was lifted in May 2025 as the hospital continued to make plans and improvements. The latest developments allows the hospital to continue billing for Medicare reimbursements.

The federal agency’s decision “affirms the significant progress staff have made to strengthen patient care and safety. I am proud of this team and tremendously grateful for this organization’s hard work — and we’re clear-eyed that this milestone is not the finish line,” Oregon Health Authority Director Sejal Hathi said in a statement. “Our charge now is to hardwire these gains into everyday practice through continued cultural and operational change, so that every patient, every day, receives safe, high-quality, therapeutic care.”  

The Oregon Health Authority runs the state hospital, which has a main campus in Salem and a satellite campus in Junction City. Together the facilities care for more than 600 patients. Most of them come from the criminal justice system, either as people who need treatment so they can aid in their defense to face pending charges or because they were sentenced to confinement in guilty except for insanity cases.

Seven months before Hass’ death, Hathi met with state hospital staffers who expressed concerns about the hospital’s culture, which they said didn’t consistently follow rules and didn’t follow up on plans for improvement. 

The Hass case is one of five unexpected deaths that hospital has experienced since November 2023. A confidential report the state hospital completed found that some staffers tried to advocate for Hass, even as he languished for months in a seclusion room, often filled with feces and urine. In that report, obtained by Lookout Eugene-Springfield, the hospital found a “culture of complacency in which safety issues can be overlooked or ignored.”

Oregon State Hospital’s interim superintendent, Jim Diegel, said the work will continue for lasting change — and it extends beyond meeting the threshold for compliance.

“This is a milestone that every caregiver has worked hard to achieve with the understanding that our work does not stop with CMS compliance,” Diegel said in a statement, referring to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “Over the past 10 months, teams across the hospital have worked diligently to not only implement corrective actions specific to the CMS findings, but to strengthen OSH’s systems around quality assurance and performance improvement to create lasting change.” 

Ben Botkin covers politics and policy in Lane County. He has worked as a journalist since 2003, most recently at the Oregon Capital Chronicle, where he covered justice, health and human services and documented regional efforts to combat fentanyl addiction. Botkin has worked in statehouses in Idaho, Nevada, Oklahoma and, of course, Oregon. When he's not working, you'll find him road tripping across the West, hiking or surfing along the Oregon Coast.