The combined health system will become the sixth largest nationwide, with $27B in revenue and 67 hospitals across six Midwest and Southeast states. The system will be based in Charlotte, and known as Advocate Health, though Atrium will continue to use its name in its markets.
Atrium CEO Gene Woods is slated to ultimately lead the combined entity, after an 18-month co-CEO arrangement with Advocate Aurora CEO Jim Skogsbergh. While the cross-market merger is unlikely to create antitrust concerns about increased pricing leverage, the Biden administration has been making noises about applying stricter scrutiny to the impact of health system consolidation on labor market competition.
The Gist: Earlier this year, Utah-based Intermountain Healthcare and Colorado-based SCL Health combined to create a 33-hospital, $14B health system, which became the 11th largest nationwide. While these mega-mergers of regional systems can realize cost savings from back-office synergies, there is a significant opportunity to create larger “platforms” of care to win consumer loyalty, deploy digital capabilities, attract talent, and become more desirable partners for nontraditional players like Amazon, Walmart, and One Medical.
It will be critical to watch whether the governance and cultural challenges that often hinder health system mergers come into play here. Advocate Aurora has had two prospective mergers fall apart in recent years, the first with Chicago-based NorthShore University HealthSystem, and the second with Michigan-based Beaumont Health (who subsequently finalized a merger with Spectrum Health earlier this year).
But the combination with Atrium is structured as a joint operating agreement, essentially creating a new superstructure atop the two legacy systems. This may allow the combined entity more flexibility in local decision-making, but the ultimate question will be how the combined entity will create value for consumers. Time will tell.
Salt Lake City-based Intermountain and Broomfield, CO-based SCL Health have now formed a 33-hospital, $14B nonprofit health system, which immediately becomes the 11th largest nationwide. The system will operate across seven states under the Intermountain brand, although the SCL hospitals will keep their legacy names and Catholic affiliation. Regulators signed off on the interstate merger after the systems agreed not to close any locations or services.
The Gist: Intermountain has been trying to build scale across the Mountain West in the last few years, having recently come up short in an attempt to merge with South Dakota-based Sanford Health.
The SCL deal will allow Intermountain to expand its SelectHealth insurance plan and integrated care model into the fast-growing Denver metro area, as well as into Kansas and Montana. As with any merger, the difficult work of combining cultures and demonstrating meaningful value for patients and consumers lies ahead.
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Overall health sector M&A activity bounced back in 2021 across nearly every subsector except one: hospitals, which saw a significant decrease in deal volume. Drawing on data from Kaufman Hall, the graphic above shows the scale of the most recent wave of health system consolidation, driven by last year’s eight “mega-mergers” between entities with over $1B in annual revenue each.
While the total number of hospital transactions decreased, the average seller size increased, with the total valuation of all hospital M&A activity nearly tripling from 2020 to 2021. With a dwindling number of independent hospitals left, health systems are pursuing larger combinations with their peers, to achieve greater scale and maintain economic “relevance.”
But as systems who have struggled to complete such mergers can attest, getting a larger deal across the finish line isn’t easy. The path to hospital consolidation now hinges on navigating complex organizational structures and issues of cultural compatibility, in addition to simply identifying “synergies” and avoiding antitrust pitfalls.
HENRY KOTULA 