Nursing home audit results at odds

By Marcia Moore
The Daily Item

January 25, 2009 08:26 am

— SUNBURY — Despite nagging questions about the financial state of Mountain View Manor, the Northumberland County Board of Commissioners has extended the contract of a Dresher agency that’s managed the nursing home for 15 years.
Majority Commissioner Vinny Clausi said he’s been dissatisfied with the slow pace of cost-cutting at the Coal Township nursing home and wanted to renegotiate the contract with Complete Healthcare Resources last year, but a contractual deadline was missed.
Under the terms of the contract, the county must notify Complete Healthcare five months in advance by registered letter if it wants to renegotiate the agreement.
“I’ve been up against a brick wall,” he said.
Clausi began to discuss renegotiating the pact in April and was assured by board Chairman Frank Sawicki that a letter was being sent.
By the end of 2008, Clausi said he learned the county had not sent a letter, so he wrote one himself on Dec. 9 informing the agency that the contract would be renegotiated this year.
Complete Healthcare has managed the daily operations of the facility — one of 37 county-owned nursing homes in Pennsylvania — since 1994, including during a period when the commissioners say the facility was “bleeding” money to the tune of about $2.8 million as recently as five years ago.
Only in the last couple of years, under the watchful eye of Sawicki and Clausi, has Mountain View Manor begun turning a net profit, they say.
However, they admit even that is in dispute.
Complete Healthcare has provided the county information showing the 283-bed nursing home earned a net operating profit of about $840,000 in 2007 and $1 million in 2008 and maintained patient services, but the county’s auditor, Parente Randolph, of Philadelphia, found the home lost about $220,000 in 2007.
Sawicki was unable to explain the discrepancy between Complete Healthcare’s figures and the audit report released last month.
“We don’t understand it,” he said Thursday, saying neither the agency or the auditors have been asked to explain.
Cathy Otto, vice president of eastern operations at Complete Healthcare, said the nursing home did in fact turn a net operating profit and the discrepancy between their figures and the auditor’s was fully explained to the commissioners last month.
“They had a comfort level about it,” she said, adding that the savings are occurring because the county board has begun implementing cost-cutting suggestions put forth by Complete Healthcare.
“For years we’ve made recommendations and this new board is following them,” Otto said.
While Clausi complains about the pace of reform, Sawicki said the commissioners are happy with the performance of Complete Healthcare, even as the agency fired Bob Druckenmiller, the top administrator at Mountain View Manor, a day after the company was given a $550,000 one-year contract extension to continue oversee operations at the nursing home.
Otto said Druckenmiller’s dismissal was a personnel matter and county officials were not involved.
“We’re happy with the agency and whatever they choose to do,” Sawicki said. “How Complete Healthcare evaluates employees is up to them. We want the nursing home to run in an efficient manner and provide the best care for the guests.”
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