UPDATE: Federal officials announced Thursday that they had accepted Vanderbilt's corrective plan, and therefore the hospital's Medicare reimbursement status was no longer in jeopardy. The hospital is now working with federal officials to enact the plan.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center is at risk of losing its Medicare reimbursement because federal officials discovered that a patient died last year after they were inadvertently injected with a powerful anesthetic.

You can read the details here, but if you don’t have time for the whole story, here are three key things you should know about Nashville’s biggest hospital.

How did the patient die?

VUMC’s Medicare reimbursement status is in jeopardy because a patient died last December when a nurse accidentally gave them the wrong medication. The patient was nervous about receiving a full body scan in the radiology department, so a doctor prescribed the patient a routine anti-anxiety medication called Versed. A nurse then went to get the Versed from an electronic medical cabinet, which can be searched by typing the name of the medication into a computer.

When the nurse could not find Versed, the nurse triggered an override feature in the cabinet computer that unlocked more powerful medications, then searched for “VE” to search of Versed and chose the first option provide by the machine. This led the nurse to inject the patient with vecuronium.

What is vecuronium?

Vecuronium is a powerful paralyzing anesthetic used to keep patients still during surgery.

The drug is also used as part of the deadly three-drug cocktail used to execute death row convicts in Tennessee and some other states.

In this case, it caused the patient to go into cardiac arrest and led to partial brain death.

How important is Medicare?

Medicare is a government program that pays for the care of elderly patients and often constitutes a large portion of the revenue at most hospitals.

Approximately 22 percent of the hospital's net revenue comes from Medicare patients, according to Vanderbilt’s most recent financial reports. If the hospital were to actually lose its Medicare reimbursement status, the financial impact could be devastating.

What happens now?

These are the key dates to keep in mind as VUMC tries to keep Medicare status.

Nov. 21: Vanderbilt submitted a corrective action plan in an effort to show the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services how the hospital will prevent a similar error from occurring again.

Nov. 30: Vanderbilt is scheduled to submit a revised plan to the Centers For Medicare and Medicaid Services, at which point CMS will decide what steps to take next.

Dec. 9: If federal officials are not satisfied with the hospital's corrections, Vanderbilt could lose Medicare reimbursement status on this date. At that point, the Medicare program will not pay for inpatient hospital services furnished to patients who are admitted on or after Dec. 9.

For patients who were admitted prior to Dec. 9, it may continue to pay for their inpatient treatment for an extra 30 days.

FULL STORY:At Vanderbilt, a nurse's error killed a patient and threw Medicare into jeopardy

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Brett Kelman is the health care reporter for The Tennessean. He can be reached at 615-259-8287 or at brett.kelman@tennessean.com. Follow him on Twitter at @brettkelman