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Mississippi’s prison healthcare provider has not met the requirements of its contract, according a report published Monday by the state’s legislative watchdog committee.
Kansas-based VitalCore Health Strategies, a private company with a three-year, $357 million contract to provide medical care in Mississippi’s prisons, failed to provide annual physical assessments for all inmates, meet staffing requirements and maintain complete patient records, the Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review, or PEER, found in the report.
The watchdog committee conducted a limited review of 13 of the contract’s requirements, finding that the company met six requirements and partially met or failed to meet the remaining seven. It reviewed documents requested in December 2025 and provided through April 2026, including 50 patients’ medical records.
“The combination of VitalCore’s proficiencies and deficiencies indicates that VitalCore only partially meets its contractual obligations and may be underserving the inmates entrusted to its care,” the report said.
VitalCore provided PEER with additional documentation after the review period ended, but still did not show it is meeting all of the requirements of its contract, according to PEER.
In a statement, Bryan Collier, VitalCore’s operations adviser, said the PEER report identified opportunities to improve documentation and reporting. He noted that VitalCore implemented a new electronic medical record system after discovering there was not one in place.
“While the report identified areas for clerical improvement, its findings also indicated that VitalCore is meeting the primary contractual requirements for the delivery of necessary healthcare services to Mississippi’s incarcerated population,” Turner said.
The Mississippi Department of Corrections did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mississippi Today.
The report comes on the heels of a more than three-hour-long hearing Oct. 15 in which lawmakers heard testimony about inadequate care in Mississippi prisons. Lawmakers heard about amputations resulting from untreated diabetes, delayed cancer treatment and a mother taking desperate measures to help her son treat his chronic pain.
Viola Riggin, VitalCore’s founder and CEO, said at the hearing that the challenges facing medical care at Mississippi’s state prisons are the residual effects of previous contractors’ impropriety.
VitalCore has provided medical care to Mississippi prisons since 2020, when it was awarded its first of four emergency, no-bid contracts. It was selected to continue providing medical care in Mississippi prisons through a competitive bidding process in 2024.
From January to September 2025, VitalCore failed to meet staffing requirements, according to PEER. Optometry was among the positions that experienced staffing shortages, with 77% of the required hours going unfilled.
During that reporting period, MDOC determined VitalCore owed roughly $6 million for staffing shortages, PEER added. Although MDOC received a $2.1 million credit on its June 2025 invoice for the year’s first quarter, VitalCore had not repaid the remaining balance as of January.
VitalCore told PEER it had entered into negotiations with MDOC over the calculation of unfilled staffing hours, claiming that MDOC was using an incorrect formula.
MDOC Commissioner Burl Cain said in a July letter to PEER included in the report that MDOC had not yet agreed to any findings by VitalCore’s auditor regarding the staffing penalty calculation and that negotiations were ongoing for the last two quarters of 2025.
People incarcerated in MDOC facilities were also not receiving annual physical assessments, as required by the company’s contract, PEER found. Of the 29 inmates whose time in custody made them due for an annual physical, only two had received an annual assessment.
VitalCore said it did not provide annual physicals because it was following an older MDOC policy approved in 2021 that scheduled health assessments every one to four years based on age and health status. Company officials said they have crafted a plan to meet the annual physical assessment requirement.
In May, VitalCore provided updated documentation to PEER showing that the percentage of people in MDOC custody due for an annual examination who had received one had increased from 7% to 86%. PEER did not independently verify the records.
PEER also identified requests for medical care missing required information. VitalCore is required to triage these requests within 24 hours or by the next scheduled clinic day, but did not indicate the initial request date about three-fourths of the time. Ten of the 32 dated records contained inconsistencies with MDOC and VitalCore spreadsheets.
MDOC and VitalCore records contained other discrepancies. For example, at least one patient’s medical records reviewed by PEER contained 11 fewer requests than MDOC and VitalCore spreadsheets reported.
“The inconsistencies between the dates in the original spreadsheet and the inmates’ actual medical records suggest potential issues with the quality of VitalCore’s data collection and the accuracy of its reporting,” the PEER report said.
VitalCore later provided additional documents pertaining to medical care requests, this time showing that 45% of the records included the initial request date. PEER declined to complete a full analysis due to the limited sample size of documents provided. The report noted that other issues, including unclear triage dates, persisted in the updated documents. An updated collection of patients’ medical care requests corrected most discrepancies between VitalCore documents and medical records regarding the number of requests.
VitalCore’s intake examinations lacked documentation of several required components. The exams included vital signs but did not record screenings for HIV, sexually transmitted infections, COVID and tuberculosis. Mammograms were marked ‘no’ on about two out of three women’s intake forms.
The intake examinations also omitted required mental health documentation, including the person’s experience with substance use or an indication that a suicide risk assessment was performed.
VitalCore later provided additional intake information and explained that mammograms were provided based on age and previous mammogram dates, as the contract permits. The company also reported that other missing components were only provided as clinically indicated.
PEER found that VitalCore met six requirements: providing timely physical and mental health intake screenings; maintaining four mobile medical units; and maintaining or creating several reports, including a monthly log of pregnant inmates, advisory committee meeting minutes and statistical quality improvement reports.
PEER recommended that VitalCore should ensure it completes all required elements of intake assessments, continue implementing its plan to provide annual physical examinations and accurately record requests for medical care. It also recommended that MDOC work with VitalCore to resolve staffing shortage issues.
MDOC entered into a contract in the summer of 2025 with Butler Snow, a politically connected law firm, to monitor VitalCore’s contract. Lawmakers passed a law in 2025 requiring a report by Dec. 15 of each fiscal year, but had yet to receive one as of July.
