A multimillion-dollar advertising contract has been swept into the center of an investigation into Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Broward Health.
Broward hired Zimmerman Advertising last May to devise a marketing strategy for the health system. The contract became a point of contention in December, when an expansion of the agreement was proposed, according to the Sun Sentinel.
The contract expansion, potentially worth $10 million per year, received partial approval last December with a push from David Di Pietro, chairman of the Broward Health board. One of Mr. Di Pietro's close friends, Chip LaMarca, was among the Zimmerman employees involved with the contract. Mr. Di Pietro told the Sun Sentinel he supported the contract because he thought Zimmerman could help the system bring in more paying patients.
The health system's former CFO Robert Martin spoke out against the agreement and said Zimmerman used skewed numbers to make an allegedly lousy deal seem more attractive. For instance, Mr. Martin claimed the advertising firm's proposal used a figure for profit per patient per night that was twice the actual profit at the health system. After multiple errors in the proposal were corrected, the return on investment from the contract plummeted from 290 percent to 7 percent. Three weeks after speaking out against the contract expansion, Mr. Martin was fired.
Jordan Zimmerman, the founder and CEO of the advertising firm, blamed Mr. Martin for the inaccuracies in the proposal. He told the Sun Sentinel that despite the company's best efforts, they were unable to get information from Mr. Martin, forcing them to use national averages. Mr. Martin told the newspaper, "That accusation is a flat-out lie."
The Zimmerman agreement is one of seven contracts the Office of Chief Inspector General of Florida will examine this week.
The dispute over the advertising contract is the latest in a string of troubles for Broward. The system was thrown into the spotlight in January when Dr. El Sanadi was found dead in his condominium from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Subsequently, a private investigator came forward, claiming Dr. El Sanadi had hired him last spring for an investigation into Broward that led to FBI involvement. Earlier this month, Broward's former compliance director said he was fired for bringing attention to illegal activities at the health system.
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