The organizations behind Amita Health, one of the largest hospital systems in Illinois, have decided to go their separate ways, splitting the system.
AdventHealth and Ascension have decided to unwind the partnership under which they’ve been operating Amita Health, which has 19 hospitals in Illinois. Some of the hospitals will operate under AdventHealth and others under Ascension.
“Leaders of both sponsoring organizations have determined that going forward separately is in their collective best interest in order to more nimbly meet the changing needs and expectations of consumers in the rapidly evolving health care environment,” Amita Health said in a news release Thursday.
Amita said there will be no disruption to patient care during the transition.
The move is a rare example of an Illinois hospital system splitting into pieces at a time when many systems are joining together to become larger and more powerful. Amita did not comment further on the reasons behind the decision, but experts speculated that perhaps the system had grown unwieldy because of its size or its leaders disagreed on key issues.
Amita spokeswoman Olga Solares said Thursday she did not yet have information about what would happen to the Amita name, when exactly the changes will take place or whether jobs or services will be affected.
Ascension is a massive Catholic health system with 142 hospitals in 19 states and the District of Columbia. AdventHealth, affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church, has nearly 50 hospitals and hundreds of care sites in nine states.
Amita is a joint operating company formed by Adventist Midwest Health and Ascension’s Alexian Brothers Health System in 2015. In 2018, 10 Presence Health hospitals joined Ascension, becoming part of Amita. Under the new plan, sites that were formerly part of Alexian Brothers Health System and Presence Health will be integrated with Ascension, according to an Amita Health announcement. Other sites will be part of AdventHealth.
Keith Parrott, Amita Health president and CEO, will lead the Ascension hospitals in Illinois, and Thor Thordarson, currently the executive vice president and chief operating officer at Amita, will lead the AdventHealth hospitals in Illinois.
Amita now has more hospitals in Illinois than any other system, despite many local systems merging and acquiring others in recent years.
Advocate Health Care merged with Aurora Health Care in 2018, and has 10 hospitals in Illinois. Northwestern Medicine acquired Centegra Health System in 2018 and now has 11 hospitals.
NorthShore University HealthSystem recently announced plans to merge with Edward-Elmhurst Health, which would create a nine-hospital system.
Hospital systems typically merge and acquire others to increase their bargaining power with health insurers, said Anthony LoSasso, an economics professor at DePaul University. Systems with more hospitals, especially popular ones, have greater leverage to ask for higher reimbursements from insurance companies, which will want those hospitals in their networks.
Hospital leaders often tout mergers and acquisitions as a way to expand access to care, share expertise and reduce costs.
The split at Amita “is going against the grain of what we’ve been seeing over the last decade or so in Chicago and in most markets outside of Chicago,” LoSasso said. It’s possible that Amita grew so big so quickly that it found it difficult to respond quickly enough to changes in Chicago-area health care, he said. Or, it’s possible that Amita’s leaders had differences of opinions about the futures of their hospitals that they couldn’t reconcile, he said.
It’s much more common for planned mergers between health care systems to fall apart than it is for already-established health systems, such as Amita, to fracture, said Michael Buchanio, a senior principal at management consulting firm West Monroe in Chicago.
Still, running a large system made up of hospitals that were previously part of other entities can present challenges, Buchanio said. Amita, for example, has continued to have different electronic medical record systems at its hospitals.
“A lot of times, it’s becoming more and more difficult for these larger health systems to align on some of these common goals and strategies,” Buchanio said. “Maintaining an agreement on a unified strategy is not easy especially when you have health systems filled with hospitals of different sizes in different regions, who may be experiencing different economic results.”
Before Presence’s hospitals became part of Amita, Presence faced significant financial challenges. In recent years, many community hospitals have struggled financially because of reimbursements from state and federal health insurance programs that don’t keep up with the costs of care, a shift away from overnight care in favor of outpatient care, and because larger, academic medical centers may attract away patients.
Hospitals that were formerly part of Presence that will presumably be integrated with Ascension include Amita Health Holy Family Medical Center Des Plaines, Amita Health Mercy Medical Center Aurora, Amita Health Resurrection Medical Center Chicago, Amita Health St. Francis Hospital Evanston, Amita Health St. Joseph Hospital Chicago, Amita Health St. Joseph Hospital Elgin, Amita Health St. Joseph Medical Center Joliet, Amita Health Sts. Mary and Elizabeth Medical Center Chicago and Amita Health St. Mary’s Hospital Kankakee.
Hospitals that were part of Alexian that will be part of Ascension include Amita Health Alexian Brothers Medical Center Elk Grove Village, Amita Health Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital Hoffman Estates and Amita Health St. Alexius Medical Center Hoffman Estates.
Hospitals that were formerly part of Adventist include Amita Health Adventist Medical Center Bolingbrook, Amita Health Adventist Medical Center La Grange, Amita Health Adventist Medical Center Hinsdale and Amita Health Adventist Medical Center GlenOaks.
