Delaware, Maryland Systems Partner On PHM
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
PRMC and Bayhealth join forces to drive innovation.
Bayhealth of Dover, DE and Peninsula Regional Medical Center of Salisbury, MD have agreed to create a loose partnership in yet another example of regional hospitals attempting to gain economies of scale and work together on managing population health while remaining nominally independent. The two institutions will share expertise, training, and tech infrastructure the CEOs of both organizations said when announcing the alliance.
Together, the new collaboration will be called HealthPartners Delmarva, named after the Delmarva Peninsula, where both providers are located. The headquarters of Bayhealth and Peninsula Regional Medical Center are about 55 miles apart.
The company heads, Peggy Naleppa of Peninsula Regional and Terry M. Murphy of Bayhealth, said the partnership was prompted by a desire to collaborate on learning the best-known treatments for disease, as well as the hope of reducing costs — by using the buying power of both hospital networks combined to get better prices on equipment and supplies, for example. “We’re not in each other's backyard, if you will," Naleppa said. "It's not about a turf issue for us."
“Creating the best experience for our patients will mean identifying and adopting best practices that focus on convenience, safety, time and cost efficiency,” Murphy said. “By bringing together the experience, innovation and patient-centered values of our two health systems, we can be even more prepared for the new realities of healthcare.”
Bayhealth is the larger organization of the two, but only slightly; it has 3,200 employees and 466 physicians on its staff. Peninsula Regional has nearly 3,000 employees and almost 300 physicians.
This is just one of a string of affiliations and partnerships in varying degrees that have emerged among smaller providers. Most recently, four critical-access hospitals in New Hampshire signed a nonbinding letter of intent to collaborate on care coordination through a new parent organization. In June, five Missouri hospitals and health systems created a population-health alliance called Health Network of