DOVER, Del. (AP) - Delaware’s corrections department is ending its contract with the company that provides medical and behavioral health care to prison inmates and has chosen a new provider, officials said Monday.
Department of Correction Commissioner Claire DeMatteis said the DOC and Connections Community Support Programs have mutually agreed to release Connections from its contracts three months before their scheduled expiration.
Centurion LLC has been chosen as the new health care provider for the state’s prisons. Centurion is based in Vienna, Virginia, and is owned by Centene Corp. of St. Louis.
Connections has been the DOC’s medical care provider since 2014 and its behavioral health services provider since 2012. DeMatteis said the agreement to release Connections from its contracts early was “amicable and professional.”
She also suggested that the accelerated timeline could help quell any concerns that Connection’s staffers, who will transition to Centurion, might start calling in sick or worrying that they would not get paid.
“We can’t run a prison health care system with those concerns. … We want to make sure that they understand that that transition will be seamless,” DeMatteis said.
Centurion is one of four firms, including Connections, that submitted proposals late last year for new medical and behavioral health contracts. DeMatteis said the bid from Connections was not competitive with Centurion’s, in either cost or quality.
The three-year agreements with Centurion begin April 1 and include two optional two-year renewals.
Under the agreements, Centurion will be paid $47.8 million for medical services, assuming full staffing. That’s slightly more than the $45 million DOC currently pays Connections. For behavioral health services, Centurion submitted a winning bid of $21.1 million, well above the $15 million DOC currently pays.
“The difference in the higher price are higher staffing levels,” DeMatteis said, adding that another cost increase factor is that Centurion wants to fill positions with more qualified personnel. For example, DeMatteis said, Centurion wants physicians in positions that might currently be filled by nurse practitioners, and psychologists with doctoral degrees rather than master’s degrees.
Centurion, which provides prison health care services in 15 other states, also is planning to hire about 30 more medical personnel in Delaware and a similar number of additional behavioral health providers, DeMatteis said.
The deal with Centurion comes after DeMatteis initiated an independent review last year of Delaware’s prison health care system.
In releasing the results of the review, DeMatteis insisted in December that inmates were getting good medical care. The review indicated, however, that the prison health care system was plagued by poor communications, little accountability and a lack of data collection and analysis. It also found that “functional governance” and “shared accountability” extending from Department of Correction leadership to prison facilities was “minimally apparent.”
Reviewers concluded that organizational changes were needed to ensure both quality improvement and process improvement.
“That report was the foundation of us rebuilding our health care services,” DeMatteis said, adding that Centurion officials have read the report and agreed to focus on its key recommendations.
Connections, like other prison medical care providers, has been the target of several lawsuits by inmates alleging inadequate care.
Last year, Delaware lawmakers unanimously approved a bill reforming a committee charged with monitoring prison health care. The bill was introduced after the attorney general’s office confirmed that it was investigating allegations that Connections had ordered staffers to forge documents to falsely state inmates were getting mental health treatment they never received. A spokesman for Delaware’s Department of Justice said Monday that the investigation is ongoing.
In January, Bayhealth Medical Center in Dover filed a lawsuit accusing Connections of failing to pay for medical care the hospital had provided to prison inmates. Bayhealth claims it is owed more than $6 million.
Meanwhile, because Bayhealth ended its service agreement with Connections in December, the DOC has been paying Bayhealth directly for inmate hospital care and will continue to do so through the end of this month. DeMatteis said the payments average about $300,000 a month and will likely total about $1 million.
“The Department of Correction will pay for those services, and we will subtract that from what we pay Connections,” she said. “The agreement is very clear that the Department of Correction is not liable in any way for any past debts owed by Connections.”
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