CoxHealth and three out-of-market health systems have joined forces to create a partnership focused on the sharing of best practices and resources.
The Springfield health system has joined BJC HealthCare of St. Louis, Memorial Health System of Springfield, Ill., and Saint Luke's Health System of Kansas City to form BJC Collaborative LLC, named after the the parent company of Barnes-Jewish Hospital and St. Louis Children's Hospital.
"You've got four systems that each are prominent providers in their market. Among them, Barnes-Jewish Hospital and St. Louis Children's Hospital are often ranked in the top five in the world, so to be able to partner with someone of that caliber can only enhance the level of quality we can provide," CoxHealth President and CEO Steve Edwards said.
With the creation of the collaborative, the hospitals have formed an eight-member board made up of the top executive and one board member from each system. The board, scheduled to hold its first meeting in January, would share ideas and make group decisions that would affect the four health systems, said Edwards, who along with CoxHealth board Chairman James Hutcheson make up the Springfield hospital's portion of the board.
A hypothetical decision the board might make, Edwards said, would be be to vote on purchasing supply items as one entity.
"We already have a pretty robust supply initiative, and BJC is not part of that. The promise of them joining it would add a lot of horsepower - it would add about a billion dollars in supply spend," Edwards said. "You can imagine the economies of scale. The more supply spend you have, the more deeper discounts you can get."
Combined, the four health systems have 4,821 hospital beds in Missouri, Illinois and Kansas and annual revenues of nearly $7 billion. Possible opportunities the collaborative would explore include:
- sharing best practices to improve performances and physician recruitment, as well as financial services such as treasury operations;
- expanding supply chain relationships, facilities design and management, clinical engineering, technology evaluation and energy conservation; and
- improving systems such as health-related information technology and data center management.
Edwards said health care reform initiatives played a part in the formation of the partnership, as, he said, changes to the industry have promise but also "looming dark clouds."
"I think uncertain times become catalytic events for alliances," he said. "While each system that's coming together had a great financial year this year, each of them also realizes that with impending cuts and whether or not the Affordable Care Act comes to be or not, the forces that have caused it are still there.
"There's a saying that's becoming popular in the business culture right now: If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together. That's our thinking right now," he added.
