Facing difficult economic times and the uncertainties of national health care reform, some Maryland hospitals are choosing to be swallowed up by larger medical systems, with an unusual string of mergers over the past 16 months and more likely on the way.
"We're getting bombarded with it every day that our health care system has to change fundamentally - it's not sustainable as it is," said Steven Thompson, senior vice president of Johns Hopkins Medicine, whose deal with Suburban Hospital in Bethesda is expected to be finalized in coming weeks.
Several institutions are moving now to consolidate. Last year, Montgomery General Hospital joined the Columbia-based MedStar Health chain and Chester River Hospital Center in Chestertown became part of the University of Maryland Medical System. Negotiations are under way for MedStar to add St. Mary's Hospital in Leonardtown to its eight hospitals, five of them in Maryland, a deal expected to be done by fall.
For smaller hospitals, the big systems offer the hope of safe harbor from whatever financial storms are on the horizon, provide doctors in places where physicians are in short supply and allow easier access to capital. The chains, in return, get footholds in new areas, where they can build market share and increase the number of patients they serve.
Patients, meanwhile, may get access to large networks of top-notch doctors, even if the patients live many miles from a major medical institution.
Not everyone is convinced that mergers are good news for patients. In some communities, people worry that new ownership can upend their relationships with their longtime physicians, particularly if the new owner eliminates services at their local hospital. So instead of more choices they get fewer, said Annette Ramirez de Arellano, health researcher at Public Citizen. And local jobs can be lost when redundant services are eliminated in order to save money after institutions merge.
Roughly a third of Maryland's 47 hospitals remain independent; they include Greater Baltimore Medical Center in Towson, Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis and Peninsula Regional Health System in Salisbury. Others, such as St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson and St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, are parts of large national chains of Catholic hospitals.
In 2007, the latest year for which statistics are available, 56 percent of the nearly 5,000 hospitals in the United States were part of systems, large or small, according to the American Hospital Association.
