CRYSTAL SPRINGS — After a previous attempted sale fell through last year, both Nella’s Inc. and Nella’s Nursing Home, two longtime Elkins businesses which have been family-owned for more than 60 years, were sold to an out-of-state company earlier this month.
The sale of the facilities to Autumn Lake Healthcare, originally based in New Jersey, became final June 1, officials said.
“We’d been talking to the family for quite some time, even going back into last year,” Mark Schwartz, the chief operating officer of Autumn Lake Healthcare, who is based in Baltimore, Maryland, told The Inter-Mountain Monday. “The official confirmation of the purchase happened on June 1.”
“I’ve been in (Elkins) for some time now,” Schwartz said. “We do have a regional administrator, as we call them, who is stationed to help oversee the two facilities. He’ll be here more often than I am.”
The Nella’s facilities were owned and operated by Thomas Eidell for decades. Eidell passed away in July 2019 and his family has operated the facilities since then.
Last year Stonerise Healthcare announced that it would buy the two facilities by the end of December 2020, but the agreement fell through and the purchase never became final.
Nella’s Inc. is a 100-bed long-term care and rehabilitation center, and Nella’s Nursing Home, Inc. is an 84-bed long-term care and rehabilitation center. Together, they employ nearly 200 people.
“All of the employees have been retained,” Schwartz told The Inter-Mountain. “We’ve been able to come in with our economies of scale and provide some benefits to the employees, such as a richer health insurance plan and so on and so forth, that a smaller company would not be able to do. We’re maintaining, at a minimum, what they had before, as well as adding some things.”
Although all the employees will retain their jobs, the names of the facilities will be changing.
“The current name will not be kept; however, due to the long tradition that Nella’s has in the community, we’ve decided to keep one of the buildings’ name sort of the same,” Schwartz said. “So it used to be called Nella’s Nursing Home, and now it will be called Nella’s at Autumn Lake Healthcare, as a tribute to the Eidell family. And the back building is going to be called Autumn Lake Healthcare at Crystal Springs.”
“The facility went through a very dramatic quasi-ownership change last year, and the rug was pulled out from underneath them at the 11th hour,” he noted. “We have been very careful to be sensitive to the employees, having meetings with whoever wanted to, in order to provide that security that we will be going through with the purchase, we won’t be pulling out the rug at the 11th hour.”
Schwartz said Autumn Lake Healthcare is hoping to add new services at the facilities.
“Our goal is to be able to expand the services. The late Mr. Eidell had chosen to not necessarily pursue the Medicare certification, so up until now, Nella’s is primarily servicing the Medicaid population,” he said. “The Medicare population comes along with a whole slew of challenges, whether it’s higher education for the nursing staff, as well as a bunch of billing processes that are kind of tedious and difficult.
“Our model throughout our portfolio is to provide both services, both Medicaid and Medicare,” Schwartz added. “So Medicare comes with a licensure process, and we’re in the process of getting that done. It’s going to be a while until the Medicare license is in place.
“We have not and will not change the home-like environment of the facility that it provides. We’re just hoping to be able to add services on top of it.”
Autumn Lake Healthcare also operates facilities in Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey and Wisconsin.
According to its website, “Autumn Lake Healthcare is a management company that provides non-healthcare services to licensed healthcare centers. Healthcare related services are provided solely by each independently owned and operated Healthcare Center. Autumn Lake Healthcare licenses the use of its name to Autumn Lake Healthcare Facilities. It was super important to us that the Nella’s name continue.”
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