West Suburban Medical Center is temporarily shutting its doors and furloughing “many” employees as it struggles to pay staff, according to the Oak Park hospital’s owner, Manoj Prasad.
Prasad, the CEO of Resilience Healthcare, said in an email Wednesday to the Sun-Times that the hospital’s emergency room, inpatient units and clinics are closing, “effective immediately.” He blamed the hospital’s year-old new electronic medical record system “that has never functioned correctly” for the payroll issues.
He did not say when the safety net hospital, which has 234 beds, would reopen.
“Despite repairs having been made, the billing and collection system still has serious problems,” Prasad wrote in the email. “The result is that West Suburban has managed to keep operating and serving its patients for a full year on a fraction of the revenue it needs.”
This comes seven months after Resilience Healthcare shuttered its other facility, Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. Like Weiss, West Suburban serves a high percentage of patients who rely on Medicaid health insurance for people with low incomes or Medicare for seniors, according to the most recent state data.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Public Health said that the agency was “disappointed by the lack of advance notice and clear communication from hospital leadership,” about the temporary closure.
“Our first and immediate concern is for the health needs of the patients and the community,” the spokesperson said. “IDPH will work closely with West Suburban, local hospitals, and other healthcare providers to help minimize the disruption of care caused by this very abrupt and significant suspension of services.”
An Oak Park spokesperson said in a statement that the hospital is working with roughly 70 patients to assess if they can be discharged or transferred to another hospital by 5 p.m. Friday. The Oak Park Fire Department was told the emergency room is no longer accepting ambulances and walk-ins were no longer allowed after 4 p.m. Wednesday.
Prasad sent a message to staff announcing the closure Wednesday morning. The email, obtained by the Sun-Times, said “many” employees will be furloughed.
The email explained that the hospital has been surviving on around “10% to 15% of our normal income” for the past year. He said to staff “at least half” of the hospital’s work is not getting billed and it will take “months of focused hard work” to resolve the billing issue.
Resilience Healthcare CEO Dr. Manoj Prasad speaking to reporters at West Suburban Medical Center last year.
Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times file
In Prasad’s email to the Sun-Times, he said hospital leadership developed a manual work-around to bill and collect revenue. While that has been working, he said it will take time to fully catch up on billing.
Because of that, the hospital will “temporarily cease providing all patient care services through the Emergency Room, the hospital and clinics, effective immediately. Once the revenue needed to fund operations is received, services will be resumed,” he wrote.
At the hospital Wednesday afternoon, some patients arriving for appointments were surprised to hear it was closing.
Sanyaa Thomas, a hospital employee, said the news was a big shock to her and her co-workers.
“It was still morning. And as we’re helping patients out, we just get an email that we were suspending patient care,” Thomas told the Sun-Times outside the hospital’s front entrance.
Thomas works the registration desk and doesn’t know if she has a job beyond this week.
“We are having patients coming in and saying, ‘What do I do?’” she said. “And it’s hurtful because I don’t have anything to tell them at this point. And we’re all just so deeply impacted by it. This was a community hospital. It’s a huge loss. Not even just for patients, also employees. We have families. We have bills.”
Thomas said the hospital has been dealing with several issues lately, including phone lines not working, trash not getting picked up and linen and hospital gown deliveries not arriving.
The new electronic medical record system has also been a huge problem, said Thomas, who has worked at West Suburban for three years. It took a long time for employees to learn how to use it and that slowed things down, she said.
The Wednesday Journal of Oak Park and River Forest newspaper first reported the closure.
Resilience Healthcare’s other facility, Weiss Memorial Hospital, closed last August after losing Medicare and Medicaid funding. Weiss had been plagued with issues for many months, including a broken air conditioning system and a dysfunctional emergency room.
At the time, Prasad warned that West Suburban could meet a similar fate.
Contributing: Kristen Schorsch