Ellicott City nursing home required to pay state $400,000 after settlement alleging substandard care

The owner of an Ellicott City nursing home will be required to pay the state $400,000 and allow an independent monitoring company to oversee the facility for three years under the terms of a settlement agreement announced Friday afternoon by the Maryland Attorney General’s Office.

The state settlement with Ohio-based nursing home chain CommuniCare Family of Companies follows an investigation by the Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud and Vulnerable Victims Unit into allegations that the business provided substandard care to hundreds of residents at the Ellicott City Healthcare Center in violation of the Maryland False Health Claims Act.

According to the Attorney General’s news release, it’s the first time in Maryland that the state’s fraud statute has been used to address care deficiencies at a nursing home and the first time that the office has imposed a monitoring agreement on such a care facility.

“Today marks a new era in my office’s fight for the rights of vulnerable Marylanders,” Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown said in the release. “It will no longer be enough for long-term care facilities to pay for the harm they’ve caused. They must commit to making improvements and providing the care that residents deserve. We will be watching.”

CommuniCare did not respond immediately late Friday to a request for comment.

The settlement announcement comes about a month after five nursing home residents with mobility impairments and complex health needs filed a federal lawsuit against the Maryland Department of Health, accusing the agency of failing in its duty to regularly inspect nursing facilities in the state and investigate complaints by residents. According to the residents, who filed the suit anonymously, this has allowed dangerously poor quality care to go undetected and uncorrected in the state.

The alleged deficiencies at the Ellicott City Healthcare Center came to the Attorney General’s attention in 2019, after the unit at the state health department responsible for inspecting nursing homes found an “unusually large number of problems” at the facility on Ridge Road. During a subsequent investigation, the Medicaid Fraud and Vulnerable Victims Unit found more than a quarter of day and night shifts were understaffed in a violation of state regulatory requirements and there were 105 falls and 86 serious wound incidents requiring emergency care.

Investigators also found, according to Friday’s news release, that there were 29 serious regulatory violations at the facility that hurt patient care, including patients wandering away from the facility, medication errors, “compromised hygiene,” and unwitnessed falls and injuries. Their review of patient records found failures by the nursing home to manage fall risks, nutritional declines and failures to address missing medical information.

“The Office of Attorney General determined that these shortcomings meant that the Medicaid recipients residing at the Ellicott City facility were receiving such substandard care that taxpayers, who paid for the care through the Medicaid program, were being defrauded,” it said in the news release.

Under the settlement, the state will be able to monitor “every relevant facet” of the nursing home’s daily operations through outside audits and unrestricted access to facility staff, corporate documents and medical files, the news release said. If further problems are identified, CommuniCare must make improvements or risk more legal action.

CommuniCare will be required to pay the costs of the outside monitoring company throughout the agreement’s three-year duration.