In a bid to shore up the financial prospects of the state-run Eleanor Slater Hospital, Rhode Island on Tuesday transitioned part of the facility to a standalone psychiatric hospital.
The state today converted the Roosevelt Benton Center on Slater Hospital’s Cranston campus to the new Rhode Island State Psychiatric Hospital. It is meant to serve 52 patients with severe mental illness — the same patients that had been treated at the facility under the Slater umbrella.
State officials hope the move will allow Rhode Island to qualify for roughly $30 million in annual Medicaid reimbursement, which it has been forced to forego for years.
Slater Hospital, which has campuses in Burrillville and Cranston, serves as Rhode Island’s hospital of last resort for patients with complex medical and psychiatric needs. It is paid for primarily through Medicaid, the federal-state insurance program for low-income and disabled residents.
A complex set of federal regulations, however, essentially bars most Medicaid payments to hospitals in which more than half of the patients are classified as psychiatric. According to regular updates from Rhode Island’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS), Slater’s patient mix has often been above that 50% threshold, meaning the state has likely lost out on tens of millions since 2019.
Since 2018, the Roosevelt Benton Center has treated patients ordered there by the courts. These “forensic patients,” some of whom have severe mental illness and are deemed incompetent to stand trial or have been found not guilty by reason of insanity, are not eligible for federal reimbursements, according to the state Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities & Hospitals (BHDDH.) However, they are counted in the hospital’s census of psychiatric patients.
The state will fund the lion’s share of the new Rhode Island State Psychiatric Hospital. But officials hope that transferring the “forensic” patients it is treating from Slater’s patient rolls to the new state psychiatric hospital’s, at least on paper, will allow Slater to slip under the 50% threshold and qualify for the millions in Medicaid on which it has been missing out.
“While the day-to-day operations at Benton will not change, a separate license will make Benton subject to standards that are more appropriate for psychiatric hospitals and will also enable us to seek federal reimbursements that can offset costs that are otherwise borne by state taxpayers,” according to a summary of the plan on BHDDH’s website.
Slater has been beset by problems in recent years. It was belatedly able to renew its full accreditation in December after a national healthcare standard-setting body issued a preliminary denial of accreditation due to patient safety concerns. It faced allegations that Slater administrators manipulated patient data in an effort to keep federal money flowing and an exodus of top leaders.
