In 2021, Block Club Chicago reported that Anosh Ahmed, former chief operating and financial officer of Austin’s Loretto Hospital, had provided Covid-19 vaccines meant for the surrounding community to ineligible recipients at Trump Tower in Chicago. The scandal revealed that Ahmed was funneling millions of dollars worth of hospital funds to his friends.
That same year, Ahmed resigned and, last year, was charged with defrauding Loretto of $15 million. Earlier this year, it was revealed that Ahmed defrauded the government of about $300 million by using fake Covid-19 testing companies. Loretto’s former CEO George Miller left the hospital in 2022 and, last year, was indicted for conspiracy to commit bribery.
With Miller’s departure, Loretto’s board approached Tesa Anewishki about taking over as CEO, a position that runs the nonprofit safety net hospital along with an executive leadership team. Over the last couple years, Anewishki has helped fight to restore Loretto’s credibility among its staff and neighbors in Austin.
“We recognized the need to rebuild the community’s trust and confidence in the organization, and we knew that the only way that we could really do that was to be a more accountable and transparent organization,” Anewishki told Austin Weekly News.
Before becoming CEO, Anewishki had worked at Loretto for 15 years — as executive director of The Loretto Hospital Foundation and as the hospital’s vice president of development — and had well-rounded knowledge of the hospital’s operations and how vital it is to the community. And Anewishki said she knew that the recent scandal would have to change the way things are done at Loretto.
“There were some key initiatives that I put into place to ensure that this never happened again,” Anewishki said of the fraud and bribery that previous hospital executives were involved in.
Loretto Hospital pretty immediately launched a three-tier oversight structure. This includes frequent compliance investigations with the hospital’s board, independent audits daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually, plus quarterly meetings with the hospital’s clergy and community advisory council to get feedback.
“Clergy is a large part of the family and the community, so to have our clergy council and community councils involved in those quarterly meetings is crucial to helping us rebuild that trust and confidence with the community,” Anewishki said.
Now that Loretto has established oversight internally, its staff are organizing town halls to get feedback from its neighbors and try to build transparency with them. Anewishki said the hospital is planning to host the town halls at least twice annually and hopefully have one by the end of the year.
“We want our community buy-in again. We want to make sure that we are reporting to the community the progress that we’ve made and the things that we are planning for this institution to increase their level of engagement,” Anewishki said. “We want to make sure that the community is well aware that we’re listening and that we are taking positive action to address their concerns.”
Loretto is also in the process of bringing back its clinical outreach team, “which plays a huge part in terms of community engagement,” Anewishki said.
Another vital part of Loretto’s commitment to its neighbors is creating more partnerships with local schools, churches and community groups. The hospital attends events that its partners put on and hosts its own to involve the community.
Loretto is also a part of two of the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services’ Healthcare Transformation Collaboratives. The collaboratives allow Loretto to help get patients a treatment or service that the hospital isn’t able to provide by connecting them with partners in the community.
“We’ve increased our partnerships tenfold,” Anewishki said. “There can’t be competition when you’re talking about saving lives.”
Community feedback
To assess whether Loretto has regained trust from its patients, hospital staff consistently surveys and checks in with them about their experiences.
“We’ve seen an increase in patient volumes, so we know that some of the service lines and improvements that we’re making at the hospital are attracting new patients to the institution,” Anewishki said.
For example, in March, Loretto opened the Women’s Wellness Center, reestablishing a women’s health clinic that had been absent at the hospital for over a decade. To date, the wellness center has served over 1,000 patients.
“When we’re in the community and we’re surveying and we’re listening to the community say, ‘These are the types of things that we need or here’s our experience at other institutions,’ we made a point to bring back women’s healthcare services,” Anewishki said. “We know that if the woman isn’t healthy, the community’s not healthy.”
Loretto is also expanding behavioral health programming, like that for substance use disorders, and will soon start offering partial hospitalization programs.
Anewishki said Loretto is going to do more specialty physician recruitment “because we know expanding access to high quality care close to home is important to the community.” She added, “We know we need to work lean, we have to work with the resources that we have, but we have to expand care where it’s needed most.”
In 2023, Loretto opened a Community Cupboard food and toiletry pantry. The hospital will be expanding it in the coming months.
“We heard from the community that there is a food insecurity issue, so we opened the Community Cupboard, which actually started out as a pantry and, within 48 hours, we turned it into a cupboard because we recognized that people are hungry right now and giving them dry goods did nothing to address their hunger issues,” Anewishki said.
The cupboard started offering single-serve meals. Currently staff distributes nearly 1,000 of those meals every month. Now, Loretto is planning to expand food access in Austin even more.
“In the spring of 2026, we’ll have the first hospital-based, free grocery store in Illinois,” Anewishki said.
Rebuilding from the inside and top-down
In 2023, about 200 unionized Loretto workers went on strike for living wages and safer working conditions. SEIU Healthcare Illinois said 120 union workers left the hospital in a year, which remaining staff said led to them being overworked.
Though unionized staff got a new contract, Anewishki said rebuilding trust among hospital workers was a priority.
“Everyone — no matter who you are, what role you play, whether you’re union or non-union — is a critical part of how this organization runs,” Anewishki said. “When you’re talking about fairness and equity on the outside, you have to make sure that, first, you have that within the four walls of this hospital.”
Loretto officials increased staff training on ethics and reporting and are listening and being transparent with staff, said Anewishki.
“I think the challenge is sometimes we might hear [complaints], but even if we take action, we don’t communicate the action that we’ve taken to address issues,” Anewishki said. “It’s not that we don’t recognize the work, we just don’t acknowledge that we recognize the work. So, we’ve done better employee recognition of our team members when they go above and beyond. That’s how you gain trust, confidence and buy-in from your team members.”
But even with buy-in from the community and staff, there’s still the matter of funding, as President Donald Trump’s One, Big, Beautiful Bill passed in July imposed Medicaid cuts. According to NBC Chicago, Loretto serves over 90,000 patients annually, 85% of whom are on Medicaid or Medicare.
“The hospital is critical to addressing the healthcare disparities on the West Side of Chicago,” Anewishki said. “For most families and individuals, we are the difference between precious life and early death. This is not just about programs and medical care, but actual quality of life, sustaining life, extending life.”
She added that, while there used to be state funds that went to safety net hospitals for equipment or infrastructure needs, those have waned in recent years. Loretto is actively advocating and partnering with elected officials to get more money for safety nets hospitals.
“Investment breeds access, and access is the antidote to communities in crisis,” Anewishki said. “I just want folks to put the legacy behind us because Loretto is not standing for its past, it’s standing for its future.”
