Weiss Memorial Hospital has lost its Illinois hospital license, even as its owners and community leaders continue to discuss plans to reopen the facility.
“Despite having over a year to make improvements at Weiss Memorial, hospital leadership has not demonstrated the necessary improvements to safely re-open the hospital to care for the community’s residents,” a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Public Health said in a statement Wednesday.
“Due to these shortcomings, the Illinois Department of Public Health will not be extending the hospital’s provisional license,” the spokesperson said.
Weiss’ regular license shifted into a provisional one about a year ago, when the Uptown hospital closed. Provisional licenses can be issued to hospitals that are not “substantially” in compliance with state law governing hospitals.
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The state health department sent a letter to Dr. Manoj Prasad, the CEO of hospital operator Resilience Healthcare, about a month ago saying it had received his request for an extension of the hospital’s one-year provisional license.
That letter, however, asked for additional information to support the request, including how the Weiss facility had been improved over the last year, which repairs had been completed and the status of HVAC system repairs. The department said in the letter it would extend Weiss’ provisional license by 30 days to allow time for Prasad to supply the additional information. Weiss responded.
Ultimately, the department “determined no major progress was made over the past 13 months,” a department spokesperson said in an email.
Prasad said in an email to the Tribune on Wednesday that state recoupments of money have made it difficult to make repairs and improvements to the hospital. When Weiss closed, it owed more than $23 million to the state in upaid taxes and penalties, and the state has been working to recoup money owed by Resilience.“A department of the State recouped $8.1 million due to Weiss that would have funded the required repairs and improvements to re-open while another department is now penalizing us for not making the improvements,” Prasad said. “We are confused by this conflicting message as we were working through the appeals processes to allow us to re-open.”
The loss of Weiss’ state hospital license is one more hurdle to any future plans to reopen the hospital. Though Weiss could still potentially reopen, it would now have to go through the regular license application process.
The license loss is the latest development in what’s become a yearslong saga over the Uptown hospital and its sister hospital, West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park.
Resilience bought Weiss and West Suburban in 2022 from Pipeline Health, after the hospitals had been losing money for years. Prasad said he had spent much of his career turning around struggling health care facilities. Resilience, which was majority owned by Prasad and minority owned by Reddy Rathnaker Patlola, would run the hospitals and Patlola’s company Ramco Healthcare Holdings would own the hospital property and act as their landlord.
A recent Tribune investigation, however, revealed that Resilience received more than $24 million in state grants while accumulating debts of roughly $100 million in state loans and unpaid taxes. The investigation revealed state officials missed red flags as they approved the hospitals’ sale and failed to follow rules as they gave money to the hospitals.
Prasad closed Weiss in August 2025, after the federal government announced it was terminating Weiss from the Medicare program following issues including failure of air conditioning units.
About eight months later, Prasad closed West Suburban, citing billing problems.
Shortly after West Suburban closed, Prasad’s Resilience and the hospitals’ landlord, Ramco Healthcare Holdings, began battling in court over the hospitals’ future. Prasad has said he hopes to reopen both hospitals, but Ramco has been pushing for a new operator for the hospitals.
Most recently, Ramco has asked a Cook County Circuit Court judge to either enforce a settlement agreement that would sell the hospitals to Insight Health Systems and remove Prasad as CEO of the hospitals or to appoint a receiver to oversee the hospitals.
An attempt to reach Patlola for comment on Weiss’ loss of its license was not immediately successful Wednesday afternoon.In addition to the loss of Weiss’ license, other challenges to reopening the hospitals also remain.
Weiss had appealed federal regulators’ decision to stop Medicare payments, and the initial appeal was dismissed, according to a document submitted to the board in July. As of July, the hospital was “weighing its remaining options,” the document states.
Also, though the president and CEO of Insight Hospital & Medical Center has said Insight would be happy to help reopen West Suburban, a group of West Suburban doctors recently voted that they have no confidence in Insight’s ability to run West Suburban.