As Madonna Rehab Hospitals holds grand opening of its new Omaha campus, controversy still swirls around new UNMC PM&R chairman's troubled past in Texas

A little over two years after breaking ground on Sept. 4, 2014, construction on Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals new $93 million campus in Omaha is now officially completed, and the hospital is ready for business.

Madonna's grand opening celebration on Thursday kicked off with
only one glitch on Thursday: How will they address UNMC
founding PM&R chairman Dr. Samuel Bierner's (seen on
the left) scandalous past?

So hospital officials hosted a private grand opening event and ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday for the Omaha metro area's first and only hospital dedicated entirely to rehab care at its newest location across from the Village Pointe Shopping Center at 17500 Burke Street, located just south of 175th and Dodge.

Self-guided tours were provided to former patients, Madonna staff, and state and local dignitaries who attended the grand opening event on Thursday morning.

Just before the ground breaking on the new facilities in 2014, Madonna Rehabilitation Specialty Hospital opened a 32-bed unit on the fourth floor of Nebraska Medicine-Bellevue to address the acute inpatient rehab needs of hospitalized patients with complex medical conditions who were ready to be discharged from the hospital but not quite ready to take care of themselves at home.

Madonna plans on merging the 32-bed unit at Bellevue into its new campus after the Omaha campus officially opens.

Texas Medical Board investigation about Kowalske, Bierner, Gabriel, Hudak, and Knapton by Michel Schwalbe

According to a 2012 study, more than 1,300 individuals a year in the metro area could have qualified for acute inpatient rehab care but were referred instead to nursing homes or discharged home to take care of themselves or arranged to have family members take care of them.

UNMC's new PM&R chairman, Dr. Samuel Bierner (center), was prominently featured just days before
our exclusive story was posted online, but since then, he has quietly disappeared from the spotlight

"The opening of the Omaha campus enables Madonna to serve an increasing number of individuals who have sustained traumatic injuries or disabling conditions," said Paul Dongilli Jr., president and CEO of Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals in a prepared statement. "The state-of-the-art facility, when combined with specialized clinical treatment teams and cutting-edge technology will provide those served with the best chance of resuming activities that give their lives meaning."

Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital's president and CEO, Paul Dongilli, Jr.

The new facilities feature 260,000-square-feet of warm, inviting space for patients with 110 private rooms for inpatient care and three major areas for patient care—an acute rehab hospital, a rehabilitation specialty hospital, and a children's rehabilitation unit. The hospital also includes a warm-water therapy pool and a chapel on site.

The Madonna Institute of Rehabilitation Science and Engineering will also be located on the campus to provide facilities for research and advancement in rehabilitation medicine.

Hospital officials said they will begin admitting patients as early as next week.

A partnership with the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) and its primary teaching hospital, Nebraska Medicine, will provide physician support for Madonna's new Omaha facilities; however, UNMC had hit some rough roads with its newly-created physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R) department and residency program earlier this month.

In an exclusive story we published earlier this month, we had discovered that UNMC's newly-appointed, founding chairman of its PM&R department, Dr. Samuel Bierner, M.D., had some serious troubles with the press, government regulators, and the medical board back in the State of Texas where he was recruited from.

Madonna's new rehab hospital in Omaha, Nebraska is open for business

Dr. Bierner was the former residency director of UT Southwestern Medical Center's PM&R program and the medical director of the PM&R department in UT Southwestern's main teaching hospital, Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas.

Dr. Bierner was named along with four other UT Southwestern PM&R faculty members— including the department's chairwoman Karen Kowalske, Vincent Gabriel, Anne Hudak, and Susan Knapton (seen in the video below)—in a 2013 U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) whistleblower lawsuit that found that the PM&R department had submitted "thousands" of fraudulent billings to Medicare and had potentially endangered the health and safety of a number of Parkland patients in the process.

Parkland eventually settled the lawsuit with the Dept. of Justice; however, not before the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) revoked the hospital's deemed status for all federal funding. CMS had found that Parkland had been an "immediate jeopardy" and a "serious threat to patient health" to all its patients.

As part of the settlement from the Department of Justice's lawsuit charging the hospital with Medicare fraud and to avoid a complete cutoff of all federal funding to the hospital for a second time in a period of less than two years, Parkland agreed to enter into a rare form of government regulatory terms of probation for five years with the U.S. Health & Human Services Office of the Inspector General (HHS OIG) called a Quality of Care Corporate Integrity Agreement (CIA) which placed on-site patient safety and billing monitors inside the hospital to keep the medical center on the straight and narrow.

Former U.S. Attorney of the Northern District of
Texas, and now director of I.C.E., Sara R. Saldana
led the government's actions against Parkland
and UTSW on two successful False Claims Act
lawsuits for Medicare fraud

It was also discovered that the five UT Southwestern PM&R faculty members named in the suit, including Dr. Samuel Bierner, were also being investigated by the Texas Medical Board for professional misconduct, while Dr. Bierner was interviewing for the top job at UNMC's fledging PM&R program.

All of this information was available in the public record as it was chronicled in detail in a four-year investigative series, First, do no harm, from Dallas' leading daily newspaper, the Dallas Morning News.

Parkland hospital has fallen on some pretty hard financial times since its numerous patient safety and billing scandals became fodder for the news media in the Dallas metropolitan area, despite the fact it had recently moved into a brand new state-of-the-art $1.32 billion facility across the street from its old location on Harry Hines Boulevard.

Hospital officials had recently slashed some 308 jobs at the embattled hospital amid budget cuts for an expected $40 million shortfall next year from projected losses in Medicare and Medicaid programs, which were due, in part, to the agreed federal settlement in billing federal programs more honestly and accurately.

There is no arguing that both UT Southwestern and Parkland suffered a great deal of damage to their reputations in the community from the series of scandals that rocked the medical center in the last five years. The combination of fraud and issues of patient safety were particularly irrevocably damning to the medical center.

Whether Dr. Bierner should retain his current position at UNMC to lead the new department is the big question on everyone's mind at the moment, since it appears he failed to disclose these bombshell revelations about his troubled past to UNMC officials when he applied for the job and was being vetted by UNMC.

This kind of embarrassing and damaging scandal will not get UNMC's new PM&R program off the ground, as they are trying to recruit a whole new department with new faculty members, staff, incoming residents, and interested medical students to join the new program, while at the same time trying to assure the public on the safety and integrity of the new rehab program offered by UNMC and its affiliated hospitals, among which is the new Madonna campus in Omaha.

The program, because it is brand new, is not yet accredited by the ACGME, the governing body for accrediting medical residency training programs nationwide, and is still years away from launching its residency training program, but that effort to get accredited may have been dramatically hampered by disturbing news of Dr. Bierner's troubling past with UT Southwestern and Parkland.

To date, we have still not heard a response from UNMC about the matter, but we are still very eager to find what their response might be.

References: 

• Medicine of Omaha—Dark secrets in Dallas, part I: Nebraska Medicine's PM&R chairman and his hidden past of Medicare fraud in Texas (2/26/17)
• Dallas Morning News series on Parkland and UTSW, "First, do no harm:"
• Parkland hospital
• Miles Moffeit
• Brooks Egerton 
• Reese Dunklin 
• Sue Ambrose
• Omaha World-Herald—Power of partnership (10/2/16)
• Omaha World-Herald—The need in Omaha (10/2/16)
• WOWT—Omaha campus of Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals opens its doors (9/30/16)
• KMTV Video—Madonna Hospitals host grand opening, tour of Omaha campus (9/29/16)
• KMTV—Madonna Hospitals officially opens Omaha campus (9/29/16), with video
• KETV—Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals holds grand opening (9/29/16) with video
• Omaha World-Herald—Madonna Rehabilitation Hospitals hold private grand opening for new $93 million campus (9/29/16)
• Becker's—Parkland Memorial Hospital to lay off 108 amid budget cuts (9/28/16)
• Dallas Morning News—Parkland slashes 300 jobs amid budget cuts (9/27/16)
• Medicine of Omaha—Exclusive: UNMC's new chairman of PM&R has a dark, troubled history of Medicare fraud, patient endangerment, and medical board investigations before coming to Omaha (9/8/16)
• Vimeo: Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital - Omaha Campus (June 2016)
• Medicine of Omaha—Samuel Bierner named to head new physical medicine & rehabilitation program at UNMC (2/27/16)
• Dallas Morning News—Federal scrutiny to follow Parkland hospital to new location (8/17/15)