A former discharge planner is suing Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital for retaliation and wrongful termination, alleging she was terminated for coming forward about alleged patient steering practices to the facility’s preferred vendors.
Kimberlee Saffore’s Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages as well as statutory penalties and damages.
“We have no comment on pending litigation,” hospital representative Tony Weiss said in response to the suit brought Thursday.
Saffore was hired in January 2025 as a discharge planner, a position in which a healthcare professional coordinates a patient’s transfer to home or another facility.
That same month, Saffore learned that Medicare patients were being referred to a particular home health vendor without being permitted to select their preferred provider, the suit alleges. The next month she expressed her concerns to management regarding a patient home health referral that she believed improperly steered the patient to a preferred vendor, the suit further states.
In April 2025, Saffore reported to a hospital director that employees were referring patients to a preferred home health vendor and interfering with the patients’ right to choose their home health provider, conduct that Ms. Saffore believed violated state and federal law, the suit states.
Saffore reported the suspected alleged unlawful referral and kickback conduct the next month through the hospital’s internal compliance line and that same month management began auditing Saffore’s patient accounts and in June 2025 she was placed on “investigatory suspension,” the suit states.
Saffore was terminated in July 2025 on a “false and pretextual basis” when the real reason she lost her job was due to her reporting of the alleged patient steering practices, according to the suit, which further states that the plaintiff has suffered lost income as well as emotional distress.