Foresight Health, the company with Chicago-based ownership that purchased the long-shuttered hospital in Patrick County two years ago, sold the property last week after its ambitious plan to reopen it as a critical access facility collapsed.
Instead, Foresight has entered an agreement with the new owner to lease back the property and use the proceeds of the sale to modernize the building and open a behavioral health and substance abuse program, Joseph Hylak-Reinholtz, Foresight’s chief operations officer, said in an email Tuesday.
According to a deed filed at the Patrick County Circuit Court clerk’s office, Foresight sold the 10-acre property in Stuart on March 12 to Chicago-based Wolf of Wabash LLC for $1.6 million. When Foresight bought the hospital in April 2022 from Virginia Community Capital, the facility’s creditor, it paid $2.1 million.
With this transaction, Foresight “officially abandons its efforts” to open a critical access hospital at the site, Hylak-Reinholtz said in the email. “Foresight Health did not reach this decision easily,” he said. “We know how important it is to the community to reopen a hospital in Patrick County, or to at least get emergency services available.”
Patrick County Administrator Beth Simms said that she didn’t have much information about the most recent transaction. “We found out through the clerk of court’s office the day after the sale,” Simms said, adding that she had little reaction to the news that Foresight plans to open a behavioral health center.
“We’ve been promised a lot of things,” she said.
Relations between Patrick County officials and Foresight leadership have deteriorated in recent months, and in January, Simms released a statement saying that the company’s hospital project would not be moving forward.
Hylak-Reinholz criticized Simms and others for the announcement, saying that more funds would be needed to continue with the project.
The company last month offered to donate the property to the county — if the county would pay half of the expenses Foresight said it had incurred while working on the project. A spreadsheet compiled by the company and obtained by Cardinal News lists Foresight’s expenses as totaling $1.63 million.
Not all of the expenses pertain directly to the hospital. The list included $22,000 in payments made to the county’s economic development director at the time and more than $457,000 for private jet travel and lodging at a luxury resort.
The county has been waiting on a brownfield grant to pay for an environmental study of the former hospital as part of its due diligence following Foresight’s proposal. Simms said she’s unsure of what will happen with the grant now.
Health care providers seeking to open or expand a service in Virginia must first receive approval from the Division of Certificate of Public Need, a regulatory body that assesses whether a community needs that service.
Foresight Health received a COPN in February 2023 to introduce inpatient psychiatric and substance use services in Stuart, said Erik Bodin, director of the office of licensure and certification at the Virginia Department of Health. COPNs are not transferable.
Foresight’s expense spreadsheet shows that more than $18,000 was spent on the application fee for a COPN.
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Foresight initially had planned to open a critical care facility in early 2023 but after more than a year of missed deadlines, the company said last month that it had become too expensive to renovate and restore health care access at the old hospital without more money.
“The cost of modernizing the aging building to a level that would achieve compliance with current hospital codes plus the additional cost of establishing the inpatient psychiatric unit went beyond $10 million by multiple estimates,” Hylak-Reinholtz said in the email on Tuesday.
Certain administrative costs also sealed the fate of the critical access hospital project, he added. “For example, we were unable to find an electronic medical records software program that was affordable,” he said. “The most ideal product would have cost us over $250,000 to design it and then cost an additional $50,000 each month once the hospital opened its doors.”
Foresight wanted to “bring the dream” of a new critical access hospital to life, but as time passed, the cost of achieving this goal rose and was no longer feasible, Hylak-Reinholtz said. Foresight leadership tried to find a way to make the project work over the past year, “but no feasible plan was ever deemed attainable.”
Dr. Sam Suhail, a psychiatric physician and the brother of company CEO Sameer Suhail, will oversee the development of the site, which Foresight said will offer a mix of inpatient and outpatient behavioral health and substance abuse services, including child and adolescent psychiatry services.
“While the full scope of services to be offered has not been determined at this time, the plan is to initially offer outpatient services and then establish a residential program. In the long term, Foresight Health plans to seek approval for a psychiatric specialty hospital,” Hylak-Reinholtz said.
Foresight does not have a specific date for opening the behavioral health and substance abuse program but wants to be open “as soon as possible.”
Had Foresight succeeded with its original plan, the new hospital would have been the first critical access facility in more than six years to serve Patrick County residents. Mississippi-based Pioneer Health Services closed its 25-bed hospital in Stuart in 2017, more than a year after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Foresight Health was founded by Sameer Suhail in February 2022 after he heard about the vacant property. Suhail said in an interview in July of that year that Foresight eventually would seek to broaden its services to include other parts of Southwest and Southside Virginia, providing dialysis and other infusion services.
However, some of Sameer Suhail’s work has faced scrutiny back home in Chicago, after he was connected to conduct that was the focus of several state and federal legal probes. In 2021, Sameer Suhail owned at least four companies with ties to Chicago’s Loretto Hospital, which had been at the center of several controversies — including a vaccination scandal — and an investigation by the Illinois Attorney General’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In his July 2022 interview with Cardinal News, Sameer Suhail denied any wrongdoing.
According to the deed recorded last week, Wolf of Wabash LLC is based at 401 N. Wabash Ave., the address of Chicago’s Trump International Hotel and Tower, where Sameer Suhail at one point had a condo.
The failure of Foresight to reopen the shuttered facility as a critical care hospital has happened against the backdrop of a nationwide trend in rural hospital closures, a trend that Virginia has not been entirely immune from, Julian Walker, the vice president of communications for the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association, said Tuesday.
“Rural hospitals face an array of unique challenges in the current landscape. Many serve communities whose populations are older, sicker, and more heavily dependent on the Medicare and Medicaid programs that reimburse health care providers at an amount below the cost of rendering care,” he said.
Those factors can place significant financial pressure on rural hospitals — which are often major community employers — and in dire cases can even threaten their survival, Walker added. Research conducted by the University of North Carolina indicates that 192 rural hospitals across the U.S. have closed since 2005.