Apparently, the additional information regulators recently received from Prime Healthcare on its application to buy Landmark Medical Center under the Hospital Conversion Act did the trick.
On Friday afternoon, The Office of Attorney General (RIAG) and the Rhode Island Department of Health announced the application is complete. The regulators suspended the application process in late March to give the parties time to complete the application, which had remained unfinished for months past the deadline.
"Given the specific circumstances of Landmark, especially that is has been in Special Mastership for five years, by this suspension, RIAG and HEALTH permitted the application to continue to be processed even though the application remained incomplete rather than rejecting it without prejudice. This gave the transacting parties more time to achieve a complete application and avoided additional delay that would have been caused by requiring the entire application to be re-filed," according to a joint release sent Friday.
On Thursday, Amy Kempe, public information officer for Kilmartin's office, said Prime Healthcare had sent new information for the application. She could not offer an estimate on how long the assessment of the new information would take at the time.
Kempe and the AG's office provided the update on the application in response to Mayor Leo Fontaine's public plea to Gov. Lincoln Chafee to intervene to get the stalled application process moving again on June 25.
On June 26, the AG's office stated that political expedience would not "short circuit" the law or the duty of the regulators. The regulator's announcement that the application was deemed complete came three days later.
In a related matter, the Department of Health also accepted Prime's application for a change in effective control ofLandmark Medical Center and the Rehabilitation Hospital of Rhode Island. Both of these applications will be heard before the Health Services Council. The Health Services Council meetings on those matters have not been scheduled.
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