South Carolina Nursing Home Blog : South Carolina Nursing Home Lawyer & Attorney : Poliakoff & Associates Law Firm : Elderly Care, Senior Care

St. Louis Today had an article about a criminal enterprise masquerading as a nursing home.  Luckily they got caught and the company pleaded guilty to fraud and will pay $1.6 million in fines and restitution.

When the Texas-based Cathedral Rock Corp. bought 11 Missouri and Illinois nursing homes in 2001, owner and CEO C. Kent Harrington told employees that residents were the first priority and would get "extra-special treatment."

The real priority was packing elderly and disabled clients into those homes — including five in the St. Louis area that were understaffed and provided substandard care, according to court documents and federal prosecutors.   Until 2005, the services "were grossly inadequate" and represented "a complete failure of care," Assistant U.S. Attorney Dorothy McMurtry said in court.

It also settled a whistle-blower civil lawsuit filed by nurses in 2003 that triggered what officials said was a relatively rare criminal prosecution of a nursing home over poor care.

Five Cathedral Rock-owned companies that ran those homes agreed to pay $1 million in criminal fines and penalties, and $628,000 in the civil settlement.  The companies will be formally sentenced in April, likely to some term of probation in addition to the fines and penalties.  So no one is going to jail for defrauding the government, stealing from medicare and medicaid, and directly causing the deaths of dozens of residents!

Among the claims was that the homes' staff doctored patient charts, falsified drug records and failed to give necessary medications. Some residents suffered from bed sores. Others wandered away. One ended up on a roof. One was found days later. One died after falling from a window.  The homes were repeatedly cited by regulators, fined and penalized.   Officials said the homes filed corrective plans but then failed to comply or "misrepresented" their efforts to comply.

"FTB (fill the beds) is everything," read a 2004 e-mail from a Cathedral Rock regional vice president to another executive. "Whereas compliance is important and cost control is as well, CENSUS is to be your primary focus," the e-mail read.

In 2004, Cathedral Rock had 2,600 beds in 25 nursing homes and assisted-living facilities in Missouri, Illinois, Texas, Ohio and South Carolina, Harrington said at the time.

Its website currently lists 1,308 beds in 15 homes in Texas and New Mexico. A spokesman said it no longer operates facilities in Missouri or Illinois.

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A resident's chart is required to be complete, accurate, and legible.  The chart is a legal-medical document that is used to communicate among shifts, to document the resident's condition and to prove the care actually provided.  Often times the charts are false, fraudulent, or simply misleading.  In The Pittsburgh Channel's article, the facility falsely documented and forged a family member's signature for reimbursement.

Team 4 investigative reporter Paul Van Osdol reported that 77-year-old Gene Cable checked into Scottdale Manor last November. Just six days later, he was dead.   Cable's daughter, Rita Wilson, wanted to find out what happened, so she requested his medical records. When she got them, she was shocked. After Cable died, one of the first documents to catch the eye of his daughter was a Medicaid reimbursement form with what appears to be her signature.

"This was a document you were supposed to sign?" Van Osdol asked.

"Yes," Wilson said.

"You never did?" Van Osdol asked.

"No. I swear to God. I didn't sign that," Wilson said.

Wilson said she also saw a nurse's notes showing that her father supposedly went to the bathroom "when he was dead. And he was continent. That means he physically got up and went to the bathroom when he was dead."

Wilson complained to the administrator of Scottdale Manor Rehabilitation Center. She says administrator Brian Bazylak told her they took disciplinary action against the employee who allegedly forged her name and the employee who entered the inaccurate nursing notes.  Did they report them to the Board of Nursing?  Did they even fire them?  Did they audit all the other charts?

Attorney Peter Giglione, who has sued numerous nursing homes, says he is not surprised by what happened to Wilson. "We've had a couple cases tried here in Allegheny County where we've had staff members charting on our client after they're dead," Giglione said.

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