A troubled nursing home shuttered
Deficiencies found at Autumn Lake Healthcare at South Haven
A Parole nursing home has closed after years of reports detailing administrative problems, safety issues and alleged Medicare fraud.
Autumn Lake Healthcare at South Haven was shuttered July 7 after the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid terminated its agreements with the facility. Federal regulators notified Autumn Lake Healthcare, the company that operates the nursing home, of the action on June 22. Since August 2020, inspectors found 61 deficiencies at the site, resulting in more than $188,000 in fines and three suspensions of Medicare payments.
The company blamed the previous operator, Sava Senior Care, for the closure. Autumn Lake took over in June 2022.
“Despite Autumn Lake Healthcare at South Haven’s efforts to enhance care and improve the facility, it was unable to overcome the challenges faced,” the company said in a statement.
The company also hired a crisis public relations spokesperson who asked that his name not be used.
All 115 residents were relocated before July 7, the spokesperson said, and the company has helped approximately 90 employees find comparable work. Those relocations were not necessarily to other Autumn Lake facilities, however, because each of the 55 locations, including 38 in Maryland, are independently owned and operated, according to the spokesperson.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ decision to terminate agreements with the South Haven site, “has no impact on other Autumn Lake Healthcare facilities, employees, or residents,” the company statement said.
But the company does operate facilities the region, including locations in Glen Burnie, Crofton, Gambrills and a second Annapolis site. Autumn Lake Healthcare is also a Baltimore Ravens sponsor, serving as the team’s official “skilled nursing facility partner.” Last week, the company became the largest purchaser of Orioles’ tickets ever, buying out nearly 12,000 seats in the upper deck of
Camden Yards.
The goodwill gesture followed a July 7 vote by workers at Autumn Lake’s Arlington West facility in Baltimore to unionize.
Autumn Lake at South Haven has been owned by SMV Annapolis LLC since 2005. Maryland’s official business registry lists SMV Annapolis as a foreign-owned, for-profit corporation with a registered address in New York’s financial district. The 10-acre property and building have an assessed value of $18 million.
For at least the past three years, South Haven had been named to the centers’ list of “Special Focus Facilities,” nursing care communities that have “a history of serious quality issues and are included in a special program to stimulate improvements in their quality of care.” This year, South Haven was the only Maryland site to make the list.
Joseph DeMattos, president and CEO of the nonprofit trade group Health Facilities of Maryland, said it’s rare for more than one or two of Maryland’s 225 skilled nursing facilities to be labeled special focus facilities. Those that are identified typically “recover from that and get better,” by addressing concerns from surveyors who serve dual roles as inspectors for the state and federal governments, DeMattos said.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services inspections are public documents, made easily searchable by the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica. The November 2022 inspection, the most recent available on the ProPublica database, found 22 deficiencies at the Parole facility, up from 14 in May of last year.
Administrative failings found at the November inspection include:
Nurses failing to wear gloves while changing wound bandages, even as inspectors watched.
Staff failing to notify family members when residents were transferred to a hospital.
Claiming that the change in operators led to difficulty accessing patients’ previous healthcare records.
Backdating health assessments so the facility could be paid by Medicare at higher rates for sicker patients, potentially before they were ill and after they had recovered. “In a clear pattern, this was evident for 6 of 6 residents selected for assessment reviews during the survey,” the report states.
DeMattos read the report and said Autumn Lake at South Haven appeared to deserve the “special focus” label. But he added that in Maryland, where the majority of Medicare and Medicaid patients live at for-profit facilities, nonprofits do not necessarily provide better quality longtime care.
“Health care challenges are less about the funding source and more about an organization becoming over-leveraged financially,” DeMattos said. “It is critical to remember that quality care and people must be the steadfast focus of nursing homes.”