West Suburban Medical Center will close its patient operations this week as the Oak Park hospital deals with a financial “crisis,” according to a hospital-wide email obtained and verified by Austin Weekly News.
The hospital will halt patient care this week and “furlough many colleagues” as the system doesn’t have the money to cover its payroll, according to an email sent by Resilience Health CEO Manoj Prasad to the health system’s staff Wednesday morning. The move comes as West Sub’s Electronic Medical Record system has failed to keep up with patient service, resulting in “at least half” of the hospital’s work not getting billed, according to the email.
“While you have been focused on healing the sick, several of us have been focused on a different crisis that started exactly one year ago when we transitioned to the new EMR,” Prasad wrote to staff. “The EMR vendor’s team with numerous consultants and experts could not understand what the problem was and how to fix it. As a result, for the past year, our hospital has survived on around 10% to 15% of our normal income. To put things in perspective, imagine if your family’s monthly income fell by 90% for a full year: that is how we’ve been feeling.”…