Doctors at West Suburban Medical Center are taking legal action against the hospital for sums they say have not been paid.
PCC Community Wellness Center — a federally qualified health center with 14 locations around Chicago and two inside West Suburban — has started a legal arbitration process to recover doctors’ unpaid paychecks from West Suburban.
“It’s not a lawsuit,” Manoj Prasad told Growing Community Media. “We have a difference in opinion. They believe we owe them something, and we believe they owe us something.”
Prasad is the owner and CEO of Resilience Health. In Dec. 2022, Resilience Health and Ramco Healthcare Holdings, LLC — a minority owner which is in charge of real estate and facilities – bought Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood and West Suburban, which sits on North Austin Boulevard on the boarder of Oak Park and Chicago’s Austin neighborhood.
The arbitration is the latest complaint about the hospital’s money management.
In May and June, resident doctors picketed to demand a union contract and requested investment in their education and better patient safety. They also called for raises and supplies, which are paid for with hundreds of thousands of dollars per resident in federal funding allocated to the hospital. But residents said they aren’t seeing that money reflected in their resources since Dr. Manoj Prasad bought West Suburban.
According to Paul Luning, the chief medical officer and a family physician at West Suburban’s PCC Community Wellness Center, West Suburban and PCC have had numerous staffing and teaching agreements since PCC launched inside the hospital.
Earlier this year, Luning said that PCC engaged in legal action against the hospital because of nonpayment for contracted services.
“There are some physicians that have not been paid for their teaching services,” said Luning, who is also halfway through a two-year term as president of the West Suburban medical staff. The position is elected, and he is not employed by the hospital.
West Suburban reimburses PCC to pay doctors for teaching residents, who are assigned to a PCC site for three years of outpatient experience.
“There’s a staffing agreement for which certain payments are due, but there are some payments due back to us as well,” Prasad said.
Because the arbitration process is ongoing, Prasad said he is unsure if he can disclose how much PCC owes West Suburban. He said West Suburban’s medical staff also teaches resident doctors at PCC.
Luning said he doesn’t have a number for how many PCC physicians haven’t been paid or how much they are owed.
But one of them, Frederick Barber, said he is out nearly $30,000, adding that it’s estimated that West Suburban owes PCC over $1 million.
Barber — who retired as a doctor three years ago after running his private practice out of West Suburban since 1975 — now works about four hours a week at the hospital monitoring resident doctors at PCC Dr. Burdick Family Health Center inside West Suburban. But he said he hasn’t been paid for over a year of work.
When Pipeline Health owned West Suburban, from 2019 to when it filed for bankruptcy at the end of 2022, Barber said he got a monthly check until the last two months of their ownership. But he said he has only received payment for four months since Prasad took ownership in December 2022.
Barber said he brought up the missing payments multiple times with Prasad, who told him to be patient, that he was hopeful money would come in.
West Suburban has long struggled with finances and has gone through multiple ownership changes in recent years.
When Prasad bought the hospital, he inherited upward of $80 million in debt. He said he has had trouble finding lenders to help him clear it.
Although Prasad said the hospital has a long way to go before being out of the red, it is slowly paying off its shortfall.
“The debt included pretty much all major vendors and suppliers in the healthcare industry,” Prasad said. “So, in order to operate, we have been slowly settling with a lot of them.”
Prasad said as he settles the hospital’s debts, he’s also adding additional services.
On July 16, West Suburban enhanced its mother-baby unit. The unit will now staff a 24/7 obstetrician, contracted from an outside company, to handle birth deliveries, a request Prasad said came from the staff.
‘Pay your workers right away’
Resident doctors formed a union in November — the first time West Suburban medical staff had done so — and have been in contract negotiations since February. In addition to asking to improve what medical residents say is a lack of resources and worsening patient care, they also want to see more impact from their program funding and better pay.
The resident doctors picketed the hospital for a second time in June to continue raising awareness for their contract negotiation requests.
“Hey Prasad, this ain’t funny. What happened to all the money?” nearly two dozen medical residents chanted at the protest. “We did the work, we need the pay. Pay your workers right away.”
The picket came as resident doctors say their program lacks the support and supplies that they require to be successful.
“Every resident in the United States gets federal funding from Medicare,” hundreds of thousands of dollars per resident, Clarissa O’Conor, a recently graduated resident and former member of the union’s bargaining team, told Growing Community Media while she was still a third-year resident. “Since Prasad has taken over, he has refused to allocate any money to the residency program.”
Prasad told Growing Community Media that the program is funded with federal money tied to patient volume and other metrics.
As resident doctors’ contract negotiations are still ongoing, they say there has been little communication from Prasad.
“As before, it’s hard to reach him and get some feedback on our requests,” said Nkiru Osefo, a second-year resident at West Suburban, during the June picket.
Prasad says otherwise: “I always have had an open-door policy for anybody who’s got these complaints.”
The elevator problem
One of medical residents’ demands regarding better patient care includes repairing the elevators at West Suburban Medical Center, which are often out of service.
Upon taking his mother to an appointment at West Suburban at the end of July, one local man shared his elevator experience with Growing Community Media.
On the day he visited, all four of the lobby’s elevators were out of service, he said as he requested to remain anonymous.
The man said patients, including his mother, had to meet with their doctors in the lobby.
“After I was there for about an hour, one of the four elevators started working again,” the man said. “But at that point, I did not trust to use it.”
He added that a hospital employee told him that elevators haven’t been regularly working for weeks, and repairs weren’t being done because the hospital hadn’t paid its bills.
“Our elevators are old. There’s no two ways about it,” Prasad told Growing Community Media in May.
In an email a few weeks earlier, Prasad said that six of the hospital’s 24 elevators were out of service because of abuse by users. While repairs are underway, he said they are expensive and replacement parts are hard to come by.
“The place had been neglected forever,” Prasad said. “A lot of our money is going towards fixing things.”
As of the beginning of August, Prasad told Growing Community Media that all of the hospital’s usually functioning elevators are back in service. He added that there is one elevator that repair workers can’t fix, and its replacement will cost close to $500,000.
“These elevators are very old, and from time to time, they break down and we have to fly in parts to make them operational,” Prasad said.
The disparity between the efforts of West Suburban’s owner and what doctors see started long before Prasad bought the hospital.
“Things had declined before Dr. Prasad came and took over,” said Karla Tytus, a provider at PCC Salud Family Health Center in Chicago’s Belmont Cragin neighborhood and a family medicine resident at West Suburban Medical Center. “It’s continuing after, but it’s been a long time in the making, so it’s also going to be a long time in the making as far as getting our concerns heard.”
And while it seems that resident doctors are in it for the long hall, Prasad is worried that picketing and bad press will only deter people from coming to West Suburban.
“Talking about these things doesn’t really help anybody’s cause because the patients start thinking, ‘Oh my God, is this a good place to go?’” Prasad said.
“But things don’t get better if you keep things under wraps,” Tytus said at the June picket. “When it comes down to it, I don’t think any of us have faith in him.”
At a time when morale among resident doctors at West Suburban feels very low, Luning said these students are a vital component at the hospital, where a majority of patients are on Medicaid.
“The hospital and the residency program, for me, are intertwined as being critically important to the success of PCC and, honestly, the care of underserved patients on the West Side of Chicago,” Luning said. “We rely on residents to take care of our underserved patients.”
“I sure hope it will survive,” he added about the residency program. “I intend to do everything we can to make it survive.”
Because the hospital has seen numerous owners over the last decade, one can’t help but consider if West Suburban might change hands again or, because the hospital has been in debt for so long, whether it’s worth keeping open. Officials say it must.
“It has to, for the care of our underserved patients,” Luning said. “For the hospitals to survive, I really think the residency program is a very important part of that.”
Prasad agreed.
“I know the community needs this,” he said about West Suburban. “I know the community doesn’t need another empty building. Support from everyone is critical.”
“I have zero intentions of selling,” added Prasad, who said that he’s fighting this battle single-handedly when it comes to the hospital’s finances. “If I get overwhelmed, that’s a different story. But we seem to be trudging along, making very good progress.”
Correction, Aug. 6, 2024, 9 a.m.: West Suburban owes employees money under the contracts it inherited, not salaries. The story has been corrected, and we apologize for the error.
