The Bay at St. Ann Health and Rehabilitation Center, a 50-bed facility on Milwaukee’s near south side formerly known as St. Ann Rest Home, will begin providing clinical rehabilitative services through Medicare under its new ownership.
The skilled nursing facility recently received certification to begin billing for Medicare coverage, allowing it to receive patients who need rehabilitative care coming out of a hospital or clinic, before they transition back to their home or lower-acuity facility.
The Bay at St. Ann, located at 2020 S. Muskego Ave., has been under a new owner-operator since December 2020, when Rockville Centre, New York-based
Champion Care bought St. Ann Rest Home from the Dominican Sisters. The Sisters cited the complicated regulatory and operational challenges of running a nursing home as the reason for the sale.
Champion Care, founded in 2017, now owns
10 skilled nursing facilities and one assisted living facility in Wisconsin.
St. Ann Rest Home, which opened in 1945 to serve older adults of Polish descent, had been owned and operated by the Dominican Sisters for 75 years. Today, it serves both the Polish community and the wider community.
John Vander Meer, spokesman for The Bay at St. Ann, said the facility’s ability to care for patients receiving services under both Medicare part A and part B programs will provide a needed service in the Milwaukee neighborhood.
It also will create a more viable payer mix for the facility, with Medicare reimbursing skilled nursing facilities at a higher rate than Medicaid’s reimbursement rate for long-term care. Nursing and long-term care facilities often seek a variety of payer sources for their services to sustain their operations, including private pay and government programs.
Prior to the new certification, The Bay at St. Ann accepted private pay and Medicaid patients.
Medicare, the country's health insurance program for people age 65 and up, covers rehabilitative care for up to 100 days in a skilled nursing facility.
Medicaid, a needs-based program, covers medical costs, including nursing home care, for people with limited financial resources. The gap in Medicaid reimbursement rates compared to the cost of providing care at nursing homes has created
significant financial challenges for facilities across the state and has been a driver of a slew of closures in recent years.
Wisconsin’s skilled nursing facilities on average lose roughly $70-80 daily for each Medicaid resident they serve, studies have found.
“Skilled nursing facility operations and management is a complicated world to operate in, and the Wisconsin long-term care provider community faces significant challenges on a variety of different levels,” said Vander Meer, who previously was president and chief executive officer of the state’s trade association for long-term care facilities, the Wisconsin Health Care Association and Wisconsin Center for Assisted Living. “It certainly starts with operations and clinical challenges but an added factor to all of that is the reimbursement in the Medicaid system.”
Vander Meer noted that Medicaid patients make up roughly two-thirds of residents in long-term care facilities.
Those challenges have led some providers, such as the Dominican Sisters, to transition ownership and operations over to larger providers like Champion Care.
The Bay at St. Ann – which has a 5-star rating from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services – currently has about 41 patients. Vander Meer said Champion Care expects admissions to grow as hospitals and health systems begin referring patients to the facility following medical procedures.
“There is definitely interest that has been articulated from friends and partners in the hospital and health system world relative to this new certification,” Vander Meer said.
