Anne Arundel Medical Center and Johns Hopkins Medicine announced yesterday a strategic alliance, giving the Annapolis hospital a chance to take advantage of Hopkins' cachet and programs and providing Hopkins access to more suburban patients.
The affiliation will mean that Arundel Medical can offer new services and that the two institutions can share the cost of developing satellite medical centers and other initiatives. It also means AMC will send some patients to Hopkins' giant East Baltimore campus for complex treatments.
The two have already begun collaborating, with Hopkins agreeing to provide primary care doctors to staff a new facility Arundel Medical will open early next year on Kent Island.
And the two have started working together on some clinical trials for oncology patients, such as testing a new way of irradiating breast cancer. That gives AMC patients access to experimental treatments without traveling to Baltimore, and provides Hopkins researchers with a larger base of patients.
Hopkins has reached out to the suburbs over the past decade with its large Green Spring Station outpatient center in Lutherville and by buying Howard County General Hospital in Columbia.
The new affiliation is not a merger or acquisition. Both hospitals retain their current management and boards. After a period of rapid-fire mergers and acquisitions in the 1990s, hospitals now are moving to such looser alliances.
"We've gotten past the point where we have to own everything ourselves," said Bonnie L. Phipps, chief executive officer of St. Agnes Healthcare.
"That was a '90s thing. Now, we're willing to share." Her Southwest Baltimore hospital announced two months ago an alliance with St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson.
Anne Arundel Medical Center resisted merger opportunities over the past decade, although it had talks with Hopkins, University of Maryland Medical System, MedStar Health and what was then North Arundel Hospital, now Baltimore Washington Medical Center, said Martin L. Doordan, chief executive officer of AAMC.
Over the past year, Doordan said he had conversations with his old friend Ronald R. Peterson, CEO of Johns Hopkins Health System - both completed the George Washington University graduate school in health administration in the early 1970s and both have been with their respective hospital systems ever since.
