Eleanor Slater Hospital Finger-Pointing Continues

PROVIDENCE, RI — The state-run Eleanor Slater Hospital, with its campuses in Burrillville and Cranston, was the topic of a Senate oversight committee hearing on Monday.

The two-and-a-half-hour hearing, the latest episode in an effort by lawmakers to get answers about a tangled web of problems at the hospital, featured finger-pointing as Dr. Brian Daly, the hospital's current chief medical officer, and his second-in-command, Dr. Andrew Stone, accused "past leadership" of cooking the data on patient mix in order to keep federal dollars flowing.

While Daly and Stone didn't name names, two former hospital doctors who resigned denied that they "manipulated patient data" to keep the ratio of medical to psychiatric patients below 50/50. Dr. Normand Decelles and Dr. Bette Gillerin spoke with The Providence Journal.

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According to a federal law covering "Institutes for Mental Disease," Medicaid and Medicare billing is only allowed if fewer than half the patients have a primary psychiatric diagnosis. Under Daly and Stone, the number of psychiatric patients at Eleanor Slater suddenly surged in the latest patient analysis.

The new numbers could effectively bar the state hospital from receiving further federal reimbursement. The hospital stopped billing Medicaid in 2019 and over $100 million in revenue was not collected.

Meanwhile, WPRI reports that a national agency is threatening to revoke Eleanor Slater's accreditation. The Joint Commission, the nonprofit that accredits more than 22,000 health care organizations nationwide, conducted a weeklong review of the embattled hospital and issued a "preliminary denial of accreditation."

The office of Gov. Dan McKee said Health and Human Services Secretary Womazetta Jones and Richard Charest, the new director of the R.I. Department of Healthcare Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals would work together to address “the many problems” identified in the preliminary report.

Eleanor Slater, sometimes described as a "hospital of last resort," serves long-term patients with complex medical and psychiatric diagnoses.