Providence, Sonoma County’s dominant hospital operator, responds to critical New York Times investigation on billing practices

Providence Sonoma County, the North Bay’s dominant hospital operator, is at the center of a critical report that detailed how the nonprofit system used aggressive tactics to induce payment from low-income patients who qualified for government health programs.

The New York Times report found that Providence, one of the country’s largest health care systems, paid millions of dollars to a consulting firm to come up with a strategy to maximize collections from patients.

Some former Providence employees described the strategies as predatory, used at inopportune moments during a hospital visit; staff were expected to repeatedly ask for payment and collect whatever they could, the article said.

The article quoted a former Providence employee Taylor Davison, who up until last year worked in the emergency department at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital registering patients.

Davison told The Press Democrat on Tuesday that said she and her other co-workers in patient access services were told to repeatedly seek payment from patients, including those with insurance copays and those with a cost-sharing Medi-Cal plan. Davison said that at one point she was required to seek at least $200 from patients who had no insurance.

“We were told to ask repeatedly and basically take any amount that they would offer because they would have these copays,” Davison said. “I was getting so burned out over the whole process.”

Providence, in a statement published Monday in response to The New York Times investigation, denied that it was taking advantage of vulnerable patients. The health care system, across the seven states that it serves, provided $1.9 billion in community benefit in 2021, including $271 million in charity care and $1.2 billion in Medicaid losses.

“Providence proactively communicates the availability of financial assistance in numerous ways and strives to engage with patients early to determine the need for assistance,” the company said in its statement. “However, it is not always possible to have these conversations in the moment given the urgency of some medical situations.”

Providence, which operates Santa Rosa Memorial, Petaluma Valley and Healdsburg District hospitals in Sonoma County, said Davison’s “description of patient experience is not consistent with our practices.”

“We are committed to getting patients the care they need and never want financial concerns to get in the way of access to care or interfere with the healing process,” according to a statement to The Press Democrat. “For emergency department visits, only at the appropriate time, we will check for insurance or if they are uninsured we will work with them to enroll them in Medicaid or financial assistance.”

Davison said she and others were asked to seek payments as soon as patients were seen by a physician in the emergency department.

“We're asking people who are ‘traumas’ who are elderly … before they get transferred to other hospitals,” Davison told The Press Democrat. “Every patient had to be asked. We were not allowed not to ask, and we had to document in the charts that we had asked.”

Providence also operates Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @pressreno.