West Suburban Medical Center’s CEO said the hospital could reopen as soon as July — if it gets a multi-million-dollar flush of cash from previously unsent invoices.
Manoj Prasad, president and CEO of West Suburban, and State Rep. La Shawn Ford held a press conference April 1 to for Prasad to share with members of the media his immediate and mid-term plans for the hospital and its patients.
West Suburban closed temporarily March 27, due to an issue with the hospital’s billing system that left up to 90% of its services unbilled, creating a cash shortfall that had the hospital unable to pay its staff. Prasad said that all patients have been transferred from the hospital and, once the issue with billing is resolved, patient services will resume.
“I have got full confidence that one way or the other, we’ll be back to provide services. We have proven it,” Prasad said.
Others aren’t so sure.
“I hear passion from Dr. Prasad, but I still don’t exactly hear where we’re going to get the cash infusion to reopen the hospital,” Ford said. “Dr. Prasad hasn’t made the case that he can do it. He has a drive to do it, but I don’t think that he has a clear guarantee to open the hospital by July.”
Dr. Chidinma Osineme, who’s been president of the hospital’s medical staff for a year, said she was not allowed at the April 1 conference because it was only for press. When asked in a hallway after the press conference if she thought the hospital would reopen soon, she said, “I have not seen that confidence yet. … I don’t have enough information to say that that’s true.”
Ford also said the hospital is at risk of foreclosure.
“Outstanding mortgage payments have been placed both on Weiss [West Sub’s sister hospital, which Prasad also owns, that closed last summer] and West Suburban, and so that means that this hospital is in foreclosure and the taxes are being sold. So we have a problem,” Ford said.
Last week when patients were transferred, West Suburban’s property owner, Rathnaker Reddy, called for someone other than Prasad to manage the hospital.
Reddy’s press relations representative told Austin Weekly News and Wednesday Journal that Reddy was first introduced to Insight Hospital and Medical Center and its CEO, Atif Bawahab, about two weeks ago by an Insight Hospital board member. He said a group of local ministers on Chicago’s West Side, who were aware of the challenges at West Suburban, reached out to the Insight board.
New ownership of West Sub would need to be approved by the State of Illinois Department of Public Health and the State Health Facilities and Services Review Board. The process of reopening the hospital under a new management organization could take several months.
Though Reddy is also a 40% owner of Resilience Healthcare, he said he was not involved in the management or operations of West Suburban and became aware of several issues of concern following the closure of Weiss. Prasad confirmed at the press conference that Reddy has no day-to-day operational responsibilities.
“I’m not quite certain how [Insight] is going to do it and how they got involved in the first place, because my landlord has absolutely no authority to be talking about operations for anybody,” Prasad said. “My question to [Insight is], why didn’t they take it in 2022 when it was available?”
Ford said at the press conference that he’s spoken with board members at Insight and the president of the hospital.
“I think that they’re very serious about coming in, but they also said that they have no idea of the books and the condition of the hospital. But they are interested in coming to the table to possibly take over,” Ford said.
When asked who he thought should manage West Suburban, Ford said the community should be involved in deciding. Prasad said he’s planning on hosting community meetings down the line, and Ford said he’ll hold him to it.
“We are asking for new leadership to help us through this,” Osineme said. She added that was the official position of the 150 doctors on the medical staff, though there were twice that number of doctors when she started in her position, and many had quit. “We want to work collaboratively. We want a seat at the table.”
West Suburban is in Oak Park on Austin Boulevard, the border between the western suburbs and Austin neighborhood of Chicago. Over 80% of West Sub’s patients were from Austin, where the only other hospital is Loretto.
“The closure of this hospital is a reversal of access to healthcare for this area,” Ford said during the press conference.
Prasad said, when it was open, West Suburban would see 80-some people a day in its emergency department and a similar number of patients in hospital beds.
While no more patients are at West Sub, other media outlets at the press conference said they’ve spoken with those who were transferred to another hospital and have struggled to get their medical records from West Sub. Because of this, they’re stalled in getting care elsewhere.
Prasad identified Subhamitra Pakrashi, vice president of quality, informatics, IT, case management at West Suburban, as the one helping patients get their records, along with a team of six. She said patients can get their records by emailing medicalrecords@westsubmc.com and identifying how urgent their case is.
Osineme told reporters after the press conference that patient safety at West Sub has suffered, especially since the swift shutdown of the hospital.
“It was abrupt. We did not get a notice,” Osineme said.
Of over 750 people working at the hospital, about 500 were furloughed. Prasad said they will collect unemployment and continue receiving benefits.
How did this happen?
Prasad said he told West Sub patients on Monday that the hospital would close on Friday. According to state regulations, hospitals need only write a letter to the state’s Health Facilities and Service Review Board and provide status updates every 30 days.
Ford said, though legally sound, the situation reveals an opportunity for the state to improve its oversight.
“That proved that we have to improve state statutes, because so many lives were put at risk because of the closure of the hospital,” Ford said. “Being able to close the hospital down in a matter of hours is not good for patient safety. He followed the law, so I think it’s on the state to make sure that there’s monitoring of the financials of a hospital to make sure, even before the hospital closes, that there is an immediate assistance or takeover.”
The closure comes after Prasad said the hospital hasn’t been paid for a majority of its services over the past year. He said, at the end of 2024, West Suburban was told that its electronic medical records system, Oracle Health EHR, formerly Cerner Millennium, would no longer be available to them.
Prasad said that the new billing system, Altera Digital Health, had issues with capturing charges.
“We discovered that, for some strange reason, we were not able to capture charges. For example, you come into my emergency room, and you then get transferred to my ICU. All those emergency room charges were vanishing. We did not know why,” Prasad said. He said the hospital missed out on 120,000 claims and hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of charges. Though the hospital knew and had people working on the issue for a year, only a month ago, Prasad put in a paper charge ticket system.
“We just did two weeks-worth of chemotherapy drugs. That was literally millions of dollars,” Prasad said of claims with the paper charge ticket system. Though the hospital would only get a fraction of the money reclaimed from missed billing over the last year, it is “enough to keep the hospital operating comfortably.”
Prasad said there are over 100 contractors overseas working to re-submit all the missed claims that the hospital hasn’t been paid for over the last year.
Following the money
At the press conference, Prasad said he was about to buy West Suburban and Weiss in June 2022, but then his lender bailed. That December, the two hospitals went to auction after their previous owner, Pipeline, declared bankruptcy, and there were no proposals. So Prasad stepped in to buy them without a lender.
“There were 1,800 jobs at stake, and the community needed the hospital,” Prasad said. When he took over, he said the hospital owed over $50 million to its vendors and had broken and faulty equipment.
Austin Weekly News and Wednesday Journal previously reported that West Suburban and Weiss owes $71 million to the state. At the April 1 press conference, Ford said West Sub owes $60 million to Pipeline, and $50 million owed for accounts payable. The Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services gave Resilience $20 million in advance payments in 2023 and $10 million advance payment last April to both hospitals while they transitioned to a new electronic medical records system. No repayment has been made to HFS.
Prasad said at the press conference that advanced payments the hospital received from the state has gone to vendors that the hospital owes in order to reduce vendor debt.
“When we took over in December of 2022, [West Suburban] posted a $40 million loss the first operating year. We operated 2023, and then 2024 we managed to come to near breaking even,” Prasad said.
In 2024, Austin Weekly News and Wednesday Journal started hearing complaints from inside West Suburban, when residents of a now-defunct program spoke out about a lack of resources and worsening patient care at the hospital.
Ford said HFS has repeatedly met with West Sub and offered operational assistance. He said HFS is reviewing the hospital’s finances through a contracted consultant.
“Initial findings indicate West Suburban was in perilous financial situations with no cash reserves, declining patient volume, and key leadership and financial roles unfilled and inadequately skilled, according to HFS,” Ford said. “The review is not complete, because West Suburban did not provide full transparency into West Suburban financials or operations.”
Prasad said that West Suburban didn’t have available financial audits for the six years before he bought the hospital. He said he’s cooperating with ongoing audits.