A family has settled a wrongful death lawsuit against a Missouri nursing home for $250,000, their attorney said.

Dollar, Burns, Becker & Hershewe, who represented the plaintiffs, said the names of the parties and the defense attorney are confidential as part of the settlement.

Dollar, Burns, Becker & Hershewe provided this explanation of the case:

After suffering a stroke, the plaintiffs’ 86-year-old mother was admitted to the nursing home to receive assistance for weakness in her left side caused by the stroke and for monitoring of anticoagulation therapy. She was taking the blood thinner Coumadin.

The patient was supposed to have been in the nursing home for less than 30 days.

Nursing home personnel, “failed to complete labs which would have told them that her anticoagulation therapy was off in order to tell the physicians so that they’d decrease the amount of the drug that she was receiving, so basically it caused her to bleed too much.”

The doctors wanted the lab tests done every Friday.

Three weeks after her admission, the nursing home staff noticed the patient was lethargic and had extremely low blood pressure. She was taken to the hospital, where she immediately was diagnosed with a gastrointestinal bleed, hypotension and renal failure, the lawyer said. The woman died the following day. The death certificate lists the cause of death as “coagulopathy due to Coumadin.”

The family alleged that the facility failed to follow doctor’s orders to monitor the patient regarding her anticoagulation therapy, which caused her gastrointestinal bleed and untimely death.

The defense attorney was contacted but declined to comment about the case.