Kansas DOC Replaces Centurion with Another Prison Healthcare Contractor
The Kansas Department of Corrections (DOC) announced on May 14, 2026 that it would drop its troubled healthcare contractor and replace it with a separate company. In a bidding process that included seven other prison healthcare profiteers, Kansas decided to replace its current contractor Centurion Health with VitalCore Health Strategies beginning on July 1 of this year.
Centurion, which does business with at least 11 other state prison systems and claims to provide services to 275,000 incarcerated people, has a long track record of abuse and neglect. In New Mexico, Centurion won a 40-month contract with the state DOC; during that time, as PLN previously reported, the company paid out over $8,396,751.00 to settle 47 claims—including 13 cases where prisoners died. [See: PLN, Dec. 2024, p.1.] Centurion’s record in Kansas is much the same.
A 2022 investigation by The Capital-Journal and the Kansas News Service, for example, found that Centurion had been fined 5,000 times in a 16-month period, for a total of nearly $1 million in fines. Later reporting from The Beacon, a nonprofit news source based in Kansas City, revealed that Centurion’s performance reports got worse in the years after 2022.
The DOC’s new contract with VitalCore, which is based in Topeka and claims to provide care to 80,000 incarcerated people in 17 states, will be for two years at a cost of around $89 million per year. The contract—covering eight adult prisons and one juvenile complex—includes options for two additional two-year extensions, meaning it could run until 2032.
VitalCore may not work out to be much of an improvement over Centurion. In Mississippi, where VitalCore gained no-bid contracts for four years in a row until 2024, prisons were rampant with untreated diabetes and Hepatitis-C, which at one point infected over 5,000 of the state’s 27,000 prisoners. [See: PLN, Dec. 2025, p.33.] The Kansas DOC noted that “multiple levels of oversight are included in the contract” with VitalCore, as well as a separate $2.3 million arrangement with the University of Kansas Medical Center to monitor contractors.
Source: The Topeka Capital-Journal
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