The Centurion Foundation completed its long-running attempt to buy Roger Williams Medical Center and Our Lady of Fatima Hospital on Friday– a move that solidifies the hospitals’ future, at least in the short term.
The Atlanta-based foundation won state approval in 2024 to acquire the hospitals, but struggled to complete a debt-based financing scheme until state officials moved quickly to approve an $18 million reserve fund in February.
Gov. Dan McKee, House Speaker Joe Shekarchi, Senate President Val Lawson, Attorney General Peter Neronha and Centurion CEO Ben Mingle gathered with dozens of health care workers at Roger Williams to celebrate the completion of the deal.
“It is a good day and it is one that many people contributed to try to make sure that, as I said, these hospitals would not close and that we would continue to have this care that the community needs,” McKee said.
Centurion bought Roger Williams and Fatima from Prospect Medical Holdings of California, which filed for bankruptcy in early 2025.
Prospect was seen as a savior when it bought the hospitals in 2014. Over time, though, it became a poster child for the adverse effect of private equity on health care, steering hundreds of millions in dividends to senior executives and other investors while presiding over the running down of its national network of hospitals.
Neronha insisted on Prospect creating an $80 million escrow fund as part of a change in the company’s ownership in 2021.
He said one of his takeaways is that public regulators have to be tough when the public interest is threatened “because if we don’t have that $80 million we’re not able to keep this place open while we’re going through Bankruptcy Court in Dallas.”
Neronha said a $40 million balance from the escrow fund will help stabilize the hospitals under Centurion’s ownership.
He said, however, that the good news about the hospitals should not obscure other ongoing health care challenges in Rhode Island.
Roger Williams and Fatima have about 2,400 employees between them and the two hospitals have lost a combined $25 million a year in recent years.
If the hospitals closed, the diversion of patients would have swamped other health care institutions in the state. Some of those institutions were already strained by the 2018 closing of Pawtucket’s Memorial Hospital.
Asked by Ocean State Media how long it will take to show whether Centurion’s turnaround plan is working, Mingle said he expects the results to come relatively quickly.
“We expect in the first year to get this organization back to a break-even level, from running incorrectly – tremendous losses in the past – to running it on a not-for-profit basis and doing the right thing,” he said. “We think we can get it back to break-even in the first year.”
Lynn Blais, president of United Nurses and Allied Professionals, and a nurse for 42 years, was among those celebrating the news of Centurion completing its deal.
“Today is an extremely good day,” she said. “I’ll proudly now be able to say I finished my career in the place where I started it – and that’s huge. That’s so important for me and my fellow co-workers.”
