Some “hospital and clinic-based” services are reportedly resuming at West Suburban Medical Center, a Resilience Health spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday morning.
The news comes roughly three weeks after the hospital abruptly closed, as hospital leadership cited a year-long lapse in its billing system that left as much as 90% of the hospital’s work going unbilled. The hospital has begun calling patients to set up appointments, the spokesperson said.
Services resuming at the hospital Wednesday will start with “primary care initially and then some specialist visits, along with testing services,” the hospital spokesperson said.
Some staff have been brought back from furlough to support the initial reopening, the statement said.
This unexpected step comes amid escalating legal tension between Resilience and
the hospital’s landlord, Ramco Holdings.
A five-day eviction notice was placed on an entryway to West Suburban Medical Center’s River Forest campus on Monday, Wednesday Journal reported earlier this week.
The notices, addressed to Manoj Prasad, Resilience CEO, and a representative of Pipeline Health, a previous hospital owner, came from Ramco Holdings, the hospital’s landlord and part-owner of the medical services operation. The notice alleged that there is more than $7.25 million in unpaid rent owed to Ramco for the River Forest property.
Prasad has challenged the eviction in Cook County court, he told Wednesday Journal this week.
The eviction notice also follows a public split between Prasad and Ramco owner Reddy Rathnaker Patola.
“Getting the clinic back open and getting patients scheduled is our first priority,” said Prasad. “We are slowly bringing staff back and rebuilding operations step by step.”
Resilience said they have a staff of 100 people working through “120,000 outstanding claims” to get back some of the revenue that the hospital said it lost through a long term malfunction in its Electronic Medical Records system.
Resilience’s statement also included quotes from long-time doctors at West Sub, including Dr. Krishdeep Khosla, an internal medicine physician with 10 years on staff at West Suburban and 28 years in practice.
“The longer this hospital stays closed, the worse it is for patients. I am helping Dr. Prasad reopen so patients can get the care they desperately need,” Khosla said.
The hospital is not offering inpatient or emergency services at this time.
Through a press representative, Patola called for West Sub to continue without Prasad’s involvement as he’s reportedly courted a deal with Insight Chicago, a non-profit agency that’s taken over operations of Mercy Hospital, a failing institution in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood.
Though Patola is also a 40% owner of Resilience Healthcare, his representative said he was not involved in the management or operations of West Suburban.
In the months leading up to the closure, Wednesday Journal reported on a variety of financial issues at West Sub and at Resilience Healthcare including unpaid vendors, the loss of the hospital’s once-revered doctor residency program and millions reportedly owed in state and local taxes.
This is a developing story.