Nursing staffing agency says Steward Health Care owes it nearly $46 million in back payments for Covid-related temp assignments

A Cincinnati staffing agency that provides temp nurses to hospitals has sued Steward Health Care Systems, which operates St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in Brighton and Carney Hospital in Dorchester, for the money it says the hospital system stopped paying for all of the health-care professionals funneled to Steward hospitals following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In its suit, filed this week in Suffolk Superior Court, ProLink Healthcare charges Steward slowed and then stopped its payments in 2022, ultimately to the tune of $45.6 million. ProLink alleges that Steward owes it $1.78 million specifically for health-care professionals sent to St. Elizabeth's and $50,093 for Carney. However, its accounting of its total bill includes $2.5 million in arrears for North Shore Medical Center, now known as Salem Hospital, which is owned by Mass General Brigham, not Steward.

ProLink says it continued to honor its end of its deal with Steward and kept paying the nurses it had sent to Steward hospitals in Massachusetts and other states through Dec. 9, when the last of the health-care professionals it had sent to a Steward hospital finished an assignment.

ProLink paid its Providers for the healthcare services rendered to Stewart and never once pulled a single Provider from a Steward assignment as a result of Steward's failure to pay.

In its complaint, ProLink says the two signs signed a staffing agreement that went into effect in April, 2020, as the first wave of Covid-19 was filling hospitals with patients. The company says it ramped up even more staffing after the omicron variant swept the country in November, 2021, once again leading to an explosion of hospital use. In total, ProLink says, it sent 1,600 health-care professionals on assignments at Steward hospitals in Massachusetts and elsewhere.

But, the company says, starting in early 2022:

When ProLink's billing department communicated with Steward regarding certain outstanding accounts receivable, Steward's billing-persons became non-responsive and/or failed to address when payments would be made. And, to accommodate Steward's billing personnel's constant requests for, inter alia, aging reports and/or copies of previously-submitted invoices, ProLink assigned multiple accounts receivable specialists, billing specialists and/or client relationship managers to the Steward account.

By mid-November, 2022, the company says, Steward was already up to $25.4 million in arrears. By May 20 of this year, ProLink alleges, Steward was up to $35.2 million in arrears - plus another $10 million in current balances.

A date for Steward to respond to the suit has yet to be set by the court.

Complete complaint (1.7M PDF).