New petition calls for state oversight and new leadership at Roseland Community Hospital

Just three months into a contract with Roseland Community Hospital, the interim director of revenue says she was abruptly removed from her position for what she describes as retaliation for alerting hospital leadership of fraud and mismanagement. Cecelia Harrison further alleges that the hospital refuses to pay her for services performed. 

She has since drafted a petition on Change.org calling for the state, county or a hospital system to provide oversight and to take over duties from the current board of directors, which runs a foundation that advises the hospital.

Harrison created the petition, which had nearly 580 signers at the time of this article’s publication. She said that after the petition reaches 1,000 signatures, she plans to take the concerns to Congresswoman Robin Kelly (D-Ill) to bring emergency state oversight to the facility. 

“I also noticed that there were no contracts with providers, which is strange,” said Harrison, the hospital’s now-former interim revenue director. She was referring to the findings she reported to the board while in her contracted position. “If you have a provider in your hospital and they don’t have a contract with you to determine their task and what they’re responsible for – and what you may be liable for versus what they’re liable for –  it creates a risky situation.” 

Harrison provided The TRiiiBE with contract documents that she maintains are signed by both her company ReveNewCycle, and hospital leadership. These documents outline the scope of work and the agreed-upon amounts due for work performed.

Concerns of neglectful behavior at Roseland Community Hospital are not new. A 2022 investigation by ProPublica and WTTW showed that errors or neglect at the institution, which mostly serves Black people, has led to the deaths of several patients since 2020. Federal regulators have cited the hospital at least 72 times since 2017, more than any other hospital in Illinois at the time, according to the report. 

Harrison’s petition draws on both these past criticisms and her own recent financial audits in concluding that the hospital is a “danger to the community.” It goes on to list seven points of alleged misconduct, including patient deaths due to violating the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act (EMTALA), a federal law that requires facilities that receive Medicare to serve all patients regardless of their ability to pay or insurance status. Her petition also regurgitates pre-existing complaints such as: the employment of providers previously found guilty of federal violations; a lack of medications, fluids, IV tubing, and basic supplies; and fraudulent billing and retaliation against whistleblowers, among other serious allegations.

Signers of the petition are asking for local government to take multiple actions to remedy fraud, mismanagement and other claims. Those five suggested steps include oversight and intervention by the Illinois Department of Public Health and Gov. J.B. Pritzker; an emergency financial and operational audit by a community medical center and Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul; replacing leadership and restructuring the nonprofit board at Roseland Community Hospital; transitioning management of the hospital to a trusted institution such as the University of Chicago Medical Center; and creating a community oversight board to ensure public accountability. 

It took only four months to get to this place. In January, Harrison says, her firm was contracted to source her as the interim director of revenue at the hospital. Her job was to find revenue sources for the hospital, among other duties. While doing a root cause analysis, she says she found cases of fraud. After alerting leadership of the fraud, Harrison said her contract was terminated.

Harrison, who is also a resident of the Roseland community, said she found cases in which the hospital had “identified multiple high-dollar unbilled accounts.” The accounts exceeded “$300,000, that were sitting in limbo with no documented plan for resolution, and [Harrison says she] initiated review processes to ensure timely billing,” according to a list of deliverables that Harrison says she sent to the hospital chairman and board of directors, dated March 26, 2025. 

“Doctors in that hospital, they have thousands of records that are not signed, which means that we can’t code them, we can’t build them, and we can’t be reimbursed for them,” said Harrison “I also found that the documentation was highly deficient. It did not speak to the issues.There weren’t any definitive diagnoses, which means that we had a lot of denials for admissions [and] a lot of premature admissions.”

Harrison said she would offer presentations to the doctors on how to properly fill out documentation, but that her efforts “fell on our deaf ears.”