The Times Union reported on a virtual press conference at Ellis Hospital featuring James K. Reed, M.D., president and CEO of St. Peter’s Health Partners, and Paul Milton, president and CEO of Ellis Medicine, as they announced the two organizations signing a letter of intent to examine a joint affiliation.
From the article:
The two health care organizations, based in Albany and Schenectady, respectively, are among the region’s largest hospital systems. Though they have operated independently for years, they began a collaboration in 2014 to coordinate care between physicians, health systems and other health care providers with the goal of improving population health and lowering costs.
That collaboration successfully reduced costs for the area’s Medicare and Medicaid populations, but could only go so far, said James Reed, president and CEO of St. Peter’s Health Partners.
“Our problem is you reach a point where you can’t go any further than that in terms of improving things because we’re bound by legal regulations,” he said. “And that’s what brought us to this point. The announcement we’re making now, rather than being I think a big surprise, is the natural evolution of a process that’s been going on for at least six years.”
With the signing of a letter of intent, St. Peter’s and Ellis will now begin the process of developing an organizational structure, he said. At a virtual news conference Wednesday, Reed said no final decisions have been made about this structure, but suggested it may resemble the model St. Peter’s currently uses — in which individual corporations still exist but operate under a single, shared board of directors made up of representatives from each group.
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