Hospice director says Catholic Charities fired her for calling out kickbacks: lawsuit
A former employee of Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas says she was fired after she raised concerns about practices that allegedly violated federal healthcare laws.
In a lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for Kansas, a former clinical director for the organization’s hospice care program claims the non-profit kept patients in hospice care when they were no longer qualified and provided illegal kickbacks to nursing homes in the hopes of receiving referrals to hospice care.
When the lawsuit’s plaintiff, Trudi Shouse, attempted to remedy these issues, she claims she was retaliated against and ultimately fired.
Catholic Charities denied the claims “but will not discuss the matter further at this time as it is the subject of litigation,” said Carol Cowdrey, senior director of marketing and media relations.
Shouse’s attorney did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Violations of law
According to the lawsuit, Shouse began noticing violations of federal healthcare law when she began working at the Northeast Kansas chapter of Catholic Charities in May 2019.
The nonprofit’s Angel Vigil program, which paid for outside agency staff to work in skilled nursing facilities, operated as a marketing scheme, the lawsuit said, that motivated nursing facilities to provide the hospice care with referrals.
Such exchanges, the suit said, are considered kickbacks, which are prohibited in federal healthcare law.
When Shouse asked about the program, the suit said, the hospice care’s business office manager, Bridgette Gregory, told her “that’s how we’ve been doing it for a long time now. Otherwise, we wouldn’t get referrals.”
Despite the warning about fewer referrals, Shouse restructured the Angel Vigil program so it was not an exchange with nursing homes for referrals, the suit said.
The lawsuit said Shouse also stopped providing two full time nurses to a nursing home, Villa St. Francis. Subsequently, the nursing home immediately stopped referring residents to the hospice care.
Furthermore, the lawsuit said, Shouse discovered around 20 patients who were still receiving hospice care even though they did not meet proper qualifications.
By federal law, she says, a patient’s qualifications must be reevaluated after 180 days and then regularly in excess of 180 days. The lawsuit alleges that Catholic Charities did not properly reassess patients, therefore allowing them to stay and improperly billing for the services provided.
Retaliation
When Shouse reported the violations to her supervisor, then-Executive Director Vince Teglia, the lawsuit says, Teglia denied the allegations and told staff they were “free to manage their cases as they see fit.”
In response, the suit said, Shouse went above Teglia’s head to the organization’s CEO and COO and was therefore “subjected to a series of escalating and adverse employment actions.”
Reached by email Tuesday, Teglia said he had not worked at Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas since January. He declined to comment on specific allegations but provided the following statement:
“Hospice business was conducted with ethical business practices, transparency, and legal and regulatory compliance as priorities of paramount importance, most especially as it pertained to patient and family care, CMS conditions of participation and billing practices, relations with long term care facilities, and the fair treatment of employees.”
Shouse said, in the suit, she was subjected by coworkers to a hostile work environment and eventually written up for events that did not occur, were taken out of context or were so vague she could not defend herself.
Later on she was suspended for “unspecified concerns received from other employees.”
In interviews following her suspension, the suit says, she was told that the concerns were related to her reports about the Angel Vigil program. Her superiors, the suit says, told her that “that’s how we’ve always run the program” and reminded her that they had “told her to go slow in making changes.”
A month after her suspension, she was fired.
Shouse is suing for retaliation under the False Claims Act.
This story was originally published September 22, 2020 at 10:11 AM.
