AG, Health Department Suspend Prime Healthcare's Application To Buy Landmark

The Attorney General's office and The RI Department of Health have suspended Prime Healthcare's application to purchase Landmark Medical Center to give them time to work on the long overdue and chronically incomplete document. 

The Attorney General's office announced the suspension Friday, four months past the original Nov. 25 deadline set for Prime Healthcare to complete the application.  

"Given our statutory obligations, we simply cannot accept an application that is incomplete," reads the AG and Health Department co-authored letter sent to Prime Healthcare's lawyers and Landmark's Special Master, Jonathan Savage.

Among the reasons for the suspension listed in the letter are: 

• Prime Healthcare's delivery of the missing information pointed out Feb. 1 was not provided in the form of an updated application, but in a series of documents totalling more than 1,400 pages. "As we have stated in the past, the initial application process should not be used to force the departments to perform work that should have been done by the transacting parties in the first place," the letter reads.
• Prime Healthcare's response to the first in a list of missing information was a statement that the only additional information required was a certification page and corporation documents, making the company's response to each missing item unclear. 
• The identifcation of the transacting parties is unclear, given the ownership of Prime Healthcare by KASP Trust, the role of Prime Management, Inc., outlined in the response to the Feb. 1 notification and the assertion that Prime Healthcare Services, Inc., "has no employees".
• Insufficient conflict of interest forms.
• Several answers to the Feb. 1 notification are unclear and raise new questions.
• Some documents have not been provided.

The letter states that the deparments will provide specifics regarding the missing information April 3, after which Prime Healthcare will be given until April 19 to finish the application.