Integrating Community Hospitals and Academic Health Systems: What Boards Should Consider
Academic health systems continue to grow in size and scope, typically through acquisitions of or mergers with community hospitals, clinics, and other local care providers....
Academic health systems continue to grow in size and scope, typically through acquisitions of or mergers with community hospitals, clinics, and other local care providers. In theory, expansion allows the organization to realize operating synergies across sites, serve more patients and communities, and allocate greater resources to the three vital components – education, research, and clinical care – of the tripartite mission. However, some academic health systems either fail to achieve these goals or take much longer than planned to achieve them.
This article – published in The Governance Institute’s Academic Health Focus – explores the key issues that academic health system boards must consider pre- and post-M&A as they look to support sensible system growth. Most importantly, a major merger or acquisition (or series of them) can be a time for an organization to reimagine its model of governance entirely – the new, larger academic health system’s governance should be a living, breathing entity that evolves and improves over time.
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