CEO Assures It’s ‘All Hands on Deck’ Towards La Grange Hospital Reopening

Progressive Health Group CEO Quentin Whitwell came to La Grange this week the meet with his staff who are working to reopen the hospital.

He invited the Record to tour the hospital on Tuesday and discuss their reopening efforts, which have been slower than the company had hoped.

“We just want the public to know that this is all hands on deck,” Whitwell said. “We’re working as fast as we can within the confines of the bureaucratic challenges and timetables. We have hired all the right personnel to perform the work. We’ve made tremendous progress. Nobody wants it open more than we do.”

Whitwell said the greatest challenge has been applying for a new hospital license, and that requires bringing the 20– year-old facility up to today’s hospital standards. The Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), which regulates hospitals in Texas, updated some of those standards this year.

“Basically what we found out is that because the license was surrendered by the previous hospital operator, we have to meet the new guidelines, which are 2026 standards, as opposed to being grandfathered- in,” Whitwell said.

According to Whitwell, the state has not yet approved any new hospitals under the new guidelines.

“In some ways, we’re a guinea pig for some of these new rules that came out,” Whitwell said.

He described the complex regulatory framework in which hospitals have to operate. For example, Whitwell said PHG wants to convert some of the hospital’s 38 inpatient beds into a rural health clinic. Those rooms were originally built with ports for medical gas and vacuum suction. Whitwell said state regulators require all of those ports to be functional and up to current standards, even though they would never be used in a clinical setting.

“There are waivers, and we’re trying to apply for waivers for those,” Whitwell said. “But again, that’s a process and a step and approvals and research.”

In addition, Whitwell said his staff has gotten mixed messages from HHSC about whether certain rooms need cabinets and sinks. The company removed some cabinets and sinks during the remodel under advise that they were not needed and later found out they had to be re-installed.

One of the most recent challenges involves the nurse call system. Whitwell said his staff hoped to reuse portions of the old nurse call system. He said the previous hospital management destroyed the call system’s computer server at the time the hospital closed (more on that below). Nevertheless, he said PHG staff attempted to retrofit the system, only to find out during an inspection that they’ll have to completely replace it with a new system with additional features.

“Millions of dollars have been spent,” Whitwell said. “The roof had to be replaced, boilers, chillers, all those things, and that doesn’t even start with the functionality (inside) the hospital.”

Whitwell stressed that no tax dollars have been spent on PHG’s acquisition and remodel of the hospital.

Investment partner and chief operations officer Jason Goyer was also on-site last Tuesday.

“We’re making all the appropriate investments,” Goyer said. “We just have to hope we’re not going to get more of the state saying one thing this day and coming back and saying something else.”

Another aspect of the hospital’s delayed reopening has to do with the way in which the facility closed down in 2023. Formerly known as St. Mark’s Medical Center, the facility was managed in its final years by a Plano-based company, Community Hospital Corporation.

Whitwell said the management at the time decided to surrender its hospital license to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission “They should not have done that,” Whitwell said. “They should have just closed the hospital and left the license attached to the hospital.”

By surrendering the license, no part of the facility could be “grandfathered-in,” he said.

In addition, PHG staff made other startling discoveries about the hospital’s closure.

“There were unforeseen things,” Whitwell said. “You just expect when someone leaves, things still work. They destroyed them.”

Whitwell said the previous management “destroyed” the computer server that controlled the nurse call system. Goyer described “voluminous” amounts of computer hard drives that were destroyed by drilling holes in them.

“You can’t follow a trail that doesn’t have data to it,” Whitwell said.

PHG staff showed the Record a bin full of computer equipment that had been destroyed, including external and internal hard drives and laptops.

Goyer said there are established procedures to destroy computer devices used in the medical industry, especially in regard to protecting private medical records. Drilling holes through hard drives is not a routine procedure, he said.

“I’ve been through a lot of these, I’ve had handoffs and transitions to other entities, acquired facilities, things of that nature,” Whitwell said. “We always tried to leave it better than we found it. The only thing I can think of is someone did not want this hospital to reopen.”

Despite the setbacks, Whitwell said PHG is committed to reopening the La Grange hospital under its new name, Progressive Health of Fayette. He declined to give an opening date at this time. Whitwell said PHG originally planned to reopen the hospital in phases, starting with the emergency room followed by other services including a rural health clinic.

“Now all of these things we’re attempting to do at one time, but we still may have to do some of that in phases,” he said.

“When we do open, we want it to shine,” Whitwell added. “We want to offer all the services that are most important to this community, and we want them to understand that when we are open, it will be something they’ll be very proud of.”