Mercer County hospital closes

Sharon Regional Medical Center officially closed at 7 a.m. Monday, leaving thousands of patients suddenly cut off from their doctors and the community bereft of critical heart care as legal wrangling continues in a Mercer County courtroom over who owns the hospital.

The doctors’ malpractice insurance ended with the closing of the 80-bed Mercer County hospital, said vascular surgeon John Ambrosino, so doctors were prohibited from seeing patients in the hospital or their offices. Even medical advice to patients by telephone had to end.

“It’s just an awful time for us,” Dr. Ambrosino said, adding that patients were in tears Friday, the last day of his clinic hours. “People are going to die from this. It’s just a terrible situation.”

Shuttering Sharon Regional, which dates back 125 years, means the end of around-the-clock availability of emergency heart catheterization care, which has been shown to be the most effective treatment for heart attacks that would otherwise be fatal. The service is not available elsewhere in Mercer County.

The closing also leaves some 850 hospital employees out of work.

Sharon Regional is part of the 31-hospital Dallas chain owned by Steward Health Care System LLC, which filed for protection from creditors in May under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code. On Dec. 27, a Texas bankruptcy court judge approved a creditors’ motion to close Sharon Regional as part of Steward’s reorganization.

Sparking hope the hospital could be reopened was the announcement Jan. 1 that Pasadena, Calif.-based Tenor Health Partners had reached a tentative agreement to acquire Sharon Regional. The plan, according to a person briefed on it but was not authorized to speak publicly about it, was to convert the hospital to a nonprofit to take advantage of government funding and grants.

Neither Sharon Regional President Bob Rogalski nor Tenor founder Radha Savitala returned calls seeking comment.

For more than 10 years, Ms. Savitala served as deputy general counsel at Prime Healthcare Services, an Ontario, Calif.-based outfit that operates 44 hospitals in 14 states, where she led mergers and acquisitions, according to a professional bio.

New operators of Sharon Regional face a big challenge. Opening the hospital and running it for 90 days until reimbursement from health insurers begins to trickle in was estimated at $45 million. Meadville Medical Center in Crawford County dropped out of the bidding for the hospital last month after it was unable to raise the necessary operating capital.

In the meantime, the state attorney general is scheduled to continue pressing its case at a hearing Jan. 28 in Mercer County Court of Common Pleas that the Sharon nonprofit Buhl Regional Trust is the true owner of the hospital — not Steward, Community Health Systems Inc., of Franklin, Tenn., the first for-profit to buy the hospital, or Medical Properties Trust Inc., the Birmingham, Ala.-based outfit that bought all of Sharon Regional’s real estate in 2017.

The state alleges that the hospital owners were bound by the sale covenant to make $75 million in capital improvements, which was never done, voiding the original transfer of ownership.

Of the total amount required by the deal, $20.2 million was outstanding, according to the state’s petition. The hearing has been continued twice and Judge Tedd C. Nesbitt has asked the defendants to show why he should not grant the attorney general’s petition.

“We’re not giving up,” Sharon City Manager Robert G. Fiscus said. “We still have fight left in us.

“I remain optimistic, but I’m not sure we have a choice.”