Although the Seton hospital system has hired a new third-party contractor to provide physician services at its Daly City location after its previous provider failed to pay doctors, whether those individuals will be paid for more than a month of work is still uncertain.
MedPage Today reported that AMHC Seton Medical Center’s previous emergency medicine staffing firm, NES Health, will wind down operations and cease doing business, and that doctors who worked for the company might be out several months of pay and not receive malpractice coverage.
At Seton Daly City, the payroll time period from at least Sept. 20 to Nov. 8 — when Seton agreed to a contract extension with NES Health to when NES informed them they wouldn’t be able to fulfill that contract — is up in the air, spokesperson Pete Hillan said.
“The short answer is, we don’t know. Physicians will have to deal with NES, because that’s who they had their contract with and who should have been paying them,” he said.
Seton had been making payments to NES that never got to physicians, Hillan said, and although a Nov. 22 press release said the group would be “taking legal measures” in light of the nonpayments, Hillan could not specify what those might be.
The hospital system did work to pay terminated NES physicians directly between Nov. 8 and Nov. 18, before its contract with the new provider, Vituity, kicked in.
“That is NES’s responsibility to pay them, but at the same time, Seton I think it’s fair to say, went above and beyond to step in when the vendor failed to meet contractual obligations,” Hillan said.
According to MedPage Today, other hospitals are also working to exit their contracts with NES Health and entering into new contracts with other emergency medicine providers, although some are facing continued concerns from staff about the lack of payment.
In a statement, a representative for Supervisor David Canepa — a member of the Board of Supervisors who has been working on issues in the beleaguered Seton hospital system since 2008 — acknowledged that the situation was disheartening but said the new vendor should help.
“The emergency physicians at Seton Medical Center in Daly City deserve to be paid and it’s disappointing that Seton’s former emergency room contractor has failed to pay doctors across 30 hospitals nationwide,” Bill Silverfarb, Supervisor Canepa’s policy adviser, wrote in a statement. “With that being said, Seton’s contracting with a new vendor should bring stability to its ER through this transition.”
Canepa had previously acknowledged ongoing systemic issues at Seton Daly City and had floated the idea of the county purchasing it.
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