After the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education – the nonprofit that ensures resident doctors deliver safe and high-quality care during graduate education programs – withdrew West Suburban Medical Center’s accreditation Jan. 21, nearly 30 residents in the hospital’s Family Medicine Residency Program started scrambling to find another institution to finish out their education before West Sub’s accreditation ends June 30.
Program faculty helped residents apply elsewhere. Kirtan Patel, a first-year resident at West Suburban, applied to AdventHealth’s Hinsdale and La Grange locations, both of which offered him a spot in their family medicine programs. This, however, was under the assumption that federal Medicare funding that hospitals get for residents’ education would move with residents to a new hospital.
AdventHealth Hinsdale revoked Patel’s offer early last month after the director and associate directors of West Suburban’s Family Medicine Residency Program – which has existed for about 50 years and is now the hospital’s only graduate medical program – told residents that the hospital wouldn’t let them take federal funding with them.
Altogether, several hospitals revoked offers for about half of West Suburban’s resident doctors.
As residents decide how to proceed, West Suburban announced March 7 that it would appeal its withdrawn ACGME accreditation. The statement didn’t mention whether the hospital would release federal funding to its residents, and Dr. Manoj Prasad, CEO of West Suburban Medical Center, didn’t respond to a request for comment by time of publication.
“We look forward to defending our record and showcasing the strength of our residency program during the ACGME appeals process. We are also reviewing the notification for errors or inaccurate information,” Prasad said in a statement. “While we prepare our appeal, the current residency program will continue. For residents who wish to transfer to another hospital, we will work with them to provide the support they need in a transition.”
Now, resident doctors are sending emails to multiple Chicagoland hospitals, asking them again to take them in – even if they can’t bring federal funding with them and an accredited hospital must cover the cost of the remainder of a resident’s education.
Residents are also asking Prasad to release Medicare funding that would make it easier to continue their education in-state, and within the family medicine specialty. Residents said they haven’t heard updates from him about their funding since they were told it wouldn’t follow them a month ago.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty now,” Patel said.
West Suburban’s Family Medicine Residency Program could continue if another hospital volunteered to absorb the program – something West Suburban leaders were “shocked and appalled” to learn, according to the statement, that residents were working toward over the last year.
According to the statement, the law firm representing Resilience Healthcare – which bought West Suburban and Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago in 2022 – sent a cease-and-desist letter March 6 to Dr. Paul Luning, chief medical officer at PCC Community Wellness Center. West Suburban contracts PCC for services, and PCC hosts doctors doing their residency at West Suburban through one of its four sites.
The West Suburban statement accuses Luning of organizing a campaign to force Prasad to sell the hospital and advising Family Medicine Residency Program leadership to discourage potential residents from coming to West Suburban.
By time of publication, Luning did not respond to a request for comment from Growing Community Media, the parent company of Austin Weekly News and Wednesday Journal.
What does accreditation loss mean for residents?
Patel’s partner is a resident at a Chicago hospital, so he’d like to stay in the area. But to transfer to another hospital without Medicare funding, Patel would need to find an institution with an open spot that’s funded by that institution’s Medicare money.
Though a couple West Suburban residents were accepted for open spots at Chicago hospitals – where a resident quit, or the hospital had federal funding to pay for their education – there are no more open family medicine residency spots in the 33 Illinois hospitals that have a family medicine program.
If these hospitals don’t create new residency spots and find a way to fund them, West Suburban residents will need to find open family medicine spots out-of-state. Or they can undergo the matching process again.
Every year, medical school graduates rank hospitals around the country where they want to carry out their multi-year residency, and hospitals do the same for graduates who applied to their institution. Graduates had to submit their choices to the National Resident Matching Program on March 5.
So, at the end of last month, Patel reapplied to family medicine residency programs in Chicago as a first-year resident, again.
“This was time sensitive. If I had missed this opportunity and not applied to the match and banked on [Prasad] releasing the funding, I have no backup … he could theoretically release the funding in May or June. The lack of transparency is very frustrating.”
If Patel doesn’t match with a Chicago hospital later this month, he plans to scramble and find any open first-year positions in the city, even if they aren’t in family medicine – his chosen specialty.
“Switching to a different specialty may require us to repeat certain parts of our training, essentially delaying the time in which we would actually make a greater salary that would allow us to pay off student loans,” Dominic Robolino, a first-year resident, previously told GCM.
“I’m doing everything I can to stay in Chicago, but we’re getting no communication from our CEO in terms of what his plans are with our funding – if he ever plans to release our funding,” Patel said.
Though not illegal, withholding funding isn’t standard practice. Family Medicine Residency Program participants have contacted all 33 Illinois family medicine programs and said that no one leading those programs knew that it was legal for a hospital to hold onto federal funding for residents who are displaced by program closure.
According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, when there’s a hospital or program closure, residents can go to any hospital that can take them. And there is no CMS requirement for transferring Medicare funds with residents – a decision that is at Prasad’s discretion, though there’s been no conversation about where he stands.
“There’s really no way to communicate our concerns to him and for him to tell us his plans,” Patel said. Residents said they’re trying to organize meetings with Prasad’s lawyer and their union lawyer, but nothing has been scheduled yet. “We want him to discuss it with us.”
According to Patel, May is likely the earliest that West Suburban would hear back from the ACGME about if its appeal is accepted. But not all residents are hoping that it is.
“I don’t think that anyone is wanting the appeal to go through because this place has just become such a terrible place to get an education that staying here for an extra year isn’t going to make you well equipped to go out there and save lives,” Harleen Multani, a third-year resident and chief resident, previously told GCM. “I think everyone is just hoping that [Prasad] will release the funds and they can move on with their lives.”
“It sucks that this program is closing because it’s a low-resource area and a lot of us came to this program because we wanted to serve this community,” Patel said. But “we’ve seen the institution itself is not an appropriate place to train residents.”
An article titled, “Forest Park’s Susan Rohde tells grand-slam stories,” which appeared in print Jan. 8 gave the incorrect date for the next Tellers Night because of incorrect information supplied to the Review. The January Tellers Night took place Jan. 14, and the next one will be held Feb. 11. We apologize for the error.
Correction, March 10, 2025, 5:45 p.m.: An earlier version of the article gave the incorrect correspondence between Kirtan Patel and hospitals he was looking to move to. AdventHealth Hinsdale rescinded his offer before he could accept it. We apologize for the error.
