Three Catholic hospital groups in northern and central Illinois have agreed to merge, forming a new $1 billion health-care system, one of the largest in the state.
The new system, to be called Provena Health, will unite Franciscan Sisters Health Care Corp. in Frankfort, ServantCor in Kankakee and Mercy Center for Health Care Services in Aurora, officials told the Tribune.
When it starts up at the end of October, Provena will employ more than 10,500 people, coordinate the services of 1,400 physicians and offer medical care to hundreds of thousands of people each year, according to materials supplied by the institutions.
By combining its three Catholic partners, the Provena system will reach from Urbana to Waukegan, encompassing seven hospitals, 11 nursing homes and senior homes, 38 clinics, six home health agencies and a Downstate health maintenance organization serving 52,000 members.
But that’s only the start: Provena will invite other hospitals and health systems to join the organization, either as affiliates or full-fledged partners, said Stuart Fulks, vice president for planning and marketing at ServantCor.
While no discussions have been held with Chicago’s Catholic hospitals, Fulks didn’t rule out the possibility. The Catholic system in Chicago, created at the urging of the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, still is in the process of getting organized.
The Federal Trade Commission has signed off on the Provena deal; state approval is expected in weeks. Next week, a new slate of officers for the system, whose combined institutions earned profits of $50 million last year, is to be announced.
The formation of Provena takes place as hospitals and other health-care providers outside the Chicago metropolitan area prepare for what they consider an inevitability–the growing dominance of managed-care plans, such as HMOs.
That trend will be fueled by the shift of large numbers of people with Medicaid, Medicare and private insurance coverage into HMOs, experts say. In turn, that will require health-care providers to organize into larger delivery systems that can coordinate medical care efficiently across many different sites, from doctors’ offices to hospitals to nursing homes.
“We want to stay ahead of these changes by creating a system that can come up with better ways to deliver health care, increasing quality and reducing costs,” said Jerry Pearson, president and chief executive of Franciscan Sisters Health Care.
Also, he noted that Chicago’s largest health-care systems–Advocate Health Care, Northwestern Healthcare and Rush System for Health–are expanding their reach into the collar counties and other areas of the state, posing a renewed competitive challenge to stand-alone hospitals and small hospital systems.
That’s a motivating force behind another important development in the Downstate Catholic health-care community–the emergence of a broad, new, mostly loosely affiliated network of 24 hospitals that will cooperate to pursue managed-care contracts. Participants also will market occupational health and health management services either to employers or HMOs, Fulks said.
