8 huge hospital moves made already this year

March 05--The shocking news caught employees and city officials off-guard as few outside of Premier's office suites apparently saw it coming.

Premier said its goal is to offer all employees other positions in the company. The satellite locations -- Good Samaritan North in Englewood and Good Samaritan Health Center Huber Heights -- will stay open. The hospital's federally qualified health center that is on site will also remain open, which officials said is a busy ambulatory center with primary care and as well as some specialists.

The merger with Bon Secours Health system would include 43 hospitals and more than 10 million patient visits annually. The deal won't affect local facilities, hospital officials said, including Springfield Regional Medical Center and Mercy Health-Urbana Hospital.

Mercy Health, headquartered in Cincinnati, is the largest employer in Springfield. It's also the largest health system in Ohio and among the top five employers in the state, with more than 33,500 employees serving communities throughout Ohio and in Kentucky.

Bon Secours Health System also is a nonprofit Catholic health system and is sponsored by Bon Secours Ministries. That company operates in Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Florida and New York. It owns, manages or maintains joint ventures for 20 hospitals and 27 post-acute care facilities or agencies, including skilled nursing facilities, home care and hospice services, and assisted living facilities.

Encompass Health's HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital of Dayton, which is now at Elizabeth Place, will relocate to the new facility. Encompass Health will oversee hospital operations once the new hospital is complete. The joint venture between Encompass and Premier is subject to negotiation. The new hospital will be designed to complement adjacent development in the near future on the former Montgomery County Fairgrounds property, which is owned by Premier Health and the University of Dayton.

Employees with health plans through the Cincinnati-based retail giant can get total hip and total knee replacement and spine surgery benefits at a fixed price through the program.

The grocery chain has about 90,000 of those who are eligible for the company's health benefits.

The news follows the announcement on Jan. 17 that Premier Health, the largest health system in the Dayton area, would close Good Samaritan Hospital, one of its two hospitals in the city of Dayton. Premier plans to move jobs and services to its other locations like Miami Valley Hospital, about five and a half miles south in Dayton.

The northwest Dayton hospital will close by the end of the year and is less than three miles from Kettering Health's Grandview. Good Samaritan reported in 2016 that it had 78,179 emergency room visits.

Dayton Children's Hospital will build a $28 million community health center on a former industrial site. The independent pediatrics hospital last year proposed to build a 50,000-square-foot medical facility by its main campus, to be called the Center for Community Health and Advocacy.

Late last year, the city of Dayton approved rezoning the former Dayton Electroplate property at the corner of Stanley Avenue and Valley Street to make way for the new center, to be built by Beavercreek-based Synergy & Mills Development.

The centers are part of a series of urgent cares that Premier will open in 2018.

The decision leaves 9,500 Medicare Advantage policy holders looking for a new plan, though Premier doesn't disclose how many commercial insurance policy holders it has.

The Dayton-based health network joined health networks around the country that tried in recent years to not only operate hospitals but also sell their own insurance plans. But most health networks lost money on these insurance ventures, partially because aspects of the Affordable Care Act were not enacted or drastically changed.

The Dayton Daily News previously reported that Premier has lost more than $40 million between the start of 2016 and the middle of 2017 on its insurance arm, though the final data for 2017 has not been released yet.

Premier Health stopped selling its insurance plans on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces at the end of last year and had tried to sell its health insurance business to another company but that deal fell apart in December.

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