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

The Monterey Herald had an article about two more nursing home operators charged with plotting to defraud the Medicare and Medicaid programs of more than $30 million and providing about 300 elderly residents with "worthless and harmful" care.

George and Rhonda Houser, who ran the Forum Healthcare Group, submitted the fraudulent claims from 2004 until the state closed the three nursing homes they operated in 2007. The two pleaded not guilty to the charges.  U.S. Attorney Sally Quillian Yates said the married couple used the money "to buy cars and real estate while their nursing home residents went without basic necessities, such as food and medicines." She said the services that did trickle down to the elderly were "so far below Medicare and Medicaid standards that they were worthless and harmful."

The Housers managed two nursing homes in Rome and a third one in Brunswick that housed about 300 elderly residents altogether. Prosecutors say they started pilfering the money in 2004, around the same time they began having problems meeting their payroll.

They failed to repair washing machines, a balky air conditioner and a leaking roof. Pantry stocks were so low that some employees spent their own money — even as their paychecks were bouncing — to buy the residents milk, bread and other staples.  Much of the nursing staff resigned because the Housers were writing bad paychecks. The Housers hired a check-cashing service to cash the employees' paychecks, and in December 2006 prosecutors say George Houser wrote the service a bad check for $120,000.

All the while, prosecutors say, the Housers were using the company's account as their personal piggy bank.  The couple bought a Mercedes-Benz with some of the funds and Rhonda Houser received at least $100,000 in checks or transfers from the account for her personal use. About $1.3 million from the account also went to buy George Houser's ex-wife a home in Atlanta.

George Houser, 62, is charged separately with failing to pay his employees' payroll taxes to the IRS and failing to file personal income tax returns.

"Pure greed being placed above the well-being of our most vulnerable citizens will not be tolerated," said Derrick Jackson of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
 

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PressConnects.com had a great article affirming the need for litigation; the article explains how a lawsuit initiated a change in policy and quality of care at several nursing homes.  The change was a result of the Rockfrod Incident.

Ortiz, bed-ridden from dementia, was a patient at a Rochester nursing home. His son, Felix Ortiz, suspected that his father was being neglected.

"I would walk into the nursing home and some of the workers were just sitting around, looking at their Avon books and not going into patients' rooms," Felix Ortiz said. "In my dad's room, it smelled like feces and urine. When you've been around your loved one all your life, you can tell what he's thinking, and I could see in his eyes that something wasn't right. There was a sadness."

In the spring of 2005, Ortiz's family authorized the state Attorney General's Office to install a hidden surveillance camera in his room. It documented that Ortiz wasn't being turned every two hours to prevent pressure sores, wasn't being given proper hydration, and was left lying for hours in his own waste while caregivers made bogus notations on his chart that proper care was being provided.  An investigation showed that supervision at the nursing home was so lax that employees who were supposed to be delivering care in some cases were sleeping, smoking, watching movies and leaving the nursing home for personal reasons while on the clock.

Eventually, 14 employees were convicted of criminal charges for falsely attesting that they had provided care to Ortiz, who died in June 2006. But his case now has a far-reaching effect on other nursing home patients across New York.

Under the settlement of a civil lawsuit brought by the Attorney General's Office against the company that formerly owned the nursing home, nine other nursing homes from Buffalo to the Bronx owned by the same company will install electronic point-of-care devices that require employees to document care as it's delivered, generating a central computer record to verify the care.

Point-of-care technology uses electronic devices to allow health-care facilities to record services, such as the dispensing of medication or the turning of bed-ridden patients, in real time. The information is used to create electronic medical records not only for patients' medical charts, but to help generate billing information for medical insurance. The point-of-care systems "will help insure that documented, consistent, high-quality care is given to each resident and allow us to capture care data in nearly real time and alert supervisors when a step is missed," the company said in a statement.

All nursing homes should be required to install electronic point-of-care devices in every patient's room.  The new system will allow caregivers to record resident information in their rooms instead of having to walk back to their station, thus saving time. The less time they spend with paperwork, the more time caregivers can spend with patients,  Many hospitals and some nursing homes currently use the technology. 

Felix Ortiz said the settlement is a tribute to his father, a retired factory worker and laborer who was known to his family for his physical strength. "He would be proud," he said. "To be part of a whole new revolution, saving lives and helping people -- that's the ultimate right there."

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