![]() Riverside County spokesperson Brooke Federico said the county “has been satisfied with the partnership with OptumServe” while acknowledging that any new partnerships have issues to work through. Last week, the county announced a new Optum clinic has been put on hold with no timetable for opening. An Optum spokesperson said the delay is to ensure the clinic is thoroughly cleaned and construction debris is cleared. Riverside County Public Health officials told the state that OptumServe staffers called in sick week after week, and were never reprimanded, the meeting notes say. “We need to get some of our money back,” she said, referring to the state’s ongoing contracts with OptumServe. Tulare County Board of Supervisors Chair Amy Shuklian, who represents Visalia and surrounding farming communities, called OptumServe’s work “disappointing” and said she wonders whether the company’s problems scared off people with limited time and transportation to get to a vaccine site. ![]() The county recently stopped working with OptumServe, saying that its relationship was so fractured that it was “beyond an ultimatum,” according to meeting notes dated April 20 written by the California Department of Public Health and obtained through a public records request. Tulare County health officials told the state that OptumServe had a “lack of knowledge” about the vaccine rollout, citing unstaffed and repeatedly delayed state-contracted vaccine sites. In addition, thousands of vaccination appointments had to be cancelled at a Sonoma County OptumServe clinic in late January due to a flaw in the company’s website. But in February, staffing and communication problems were flagged in Lassen County, which cut ties to OptumServe’s clinic in Susanville. ![]() The problems in more than a dozen counties revealed in the documents have not been previously reported. In written responses to questions, OptumServe and the California Department of Public Health acknowledged missteps and attributed some early miscommunication and staffing shortages to the unprecedented nature of the pandemic and the unique challenges of delivering vaccines to all corners of California. Gavin Newsom’s 2022 re-election campaign and his standing ballot measure committee during the pandemic in December, raising questions from critics, including Bob Stern, principal co-author of the state’s Political Reform Act, about the use of no-bid contracts with politically connected contractors. UnitedHealth contributed $131,000 to Gov. Its $200-billion parent company, UnitedHealth Group, is the nation’s second-largest health care company. OptumServe is a Minnesota-based company hired by the federal government to manage health care. For its two contracts for running hundreds of California testing sites, the state also agreed to pay OptumServe up to $838 million, and has already paid $282.5 million. So far, OptumServe has billed the state $4.8 million for its vaccine contract, according to figures provided by the California Department of Public Health. Included is up to $221 million authorized through September 2021 to work on the vaccination rollout. Over the past year, the state awarded OptumServe and its subsidiary, Logistics Health Inc., three no-bid contracts totaling up to $1 billion to run hundreds of California’s testing and vaccine sites. The Brown Institute for Media Innovation’s Documenting COVID-19 project in collaboration with CalMatters reviewed thousands of pages of internal emails about OptumServe and conducted interviews with county health departments. The company still has 30 sites operating in 23 counties across California. At several vaccine sites, OptumServe failed to deliver the minimum 420 doses it pledged to distribute each day.Īt least three counties - Lassen, Madera and Tulare - stopped working with OptumServe, are taking back doses and turning instead to community groups for running their vaccination sites. It has helped administer about 370,000 doses since January - just 1.1% of California’s nearly 34 million during that span. The company has fallen far short of the up to 100,000 daily vaccine doses it told the state in its contracts that it could deliver. Officials from at least 12 counties complained to the state Department of Public Health about delays and other problems with OptumServe, saying that the problems hampered their ability to get shots into arms, according to state documents obtained through a Public Records Act request. ![]() California agreed to pay OptumServe up to $221 million during the pandemic to coordinate and operate dozens of vaccination sites. But the health care company’s work in at least a dozen counties has been plagued by miscommunication and staffing shortages.
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