UAB Health System to acquire Ascension St. Vincent's

The University of Alabama (UAB) Health System will take over Ascension St. Vincent’s Health System in central Alabama.

UAB’s Board of Trustees Tuesday unanimously approved an agreement for the UAB Health System to assume ownership of St. Vincent’s.

“Patients will continue to have access to the health care services and providers they’ve come to trust, and ultimately gain access to a larger care network,” said Dawn Bulgarella, CEO of UAB Health System in a Tuesday news conference in Birmingham.

The acquisition includes all Ascension St. Vincent’s sites of care, including St. Vincent’s hospitals in Birmingham (main and East campus), Blount, Chilton, Shelby and St. Clair counties; the Trussville freestanding emergency clinic and various imaging centers and clinics.

UAB and the Ascension St. Vincent’s established a partnership in 2020 to increase access to medical care. Bulgarella said a “deeper affiliation between Ascension St. Vincent’s and the UAB health system would ensure that the community has sustainable quality healthcare access long into the future.”

Jason Alexander, senior vice president of Ascension and CEO of Ascension St. Vincent’s, said “in an increasingly complex environment,” merging the two health systems will help sustain current services and give access to more services.

“It became clear that adding Ascension St. Vincent’s to UAB Health System’s network of owned hospitals – and combining and optimizing our collective strengths – is the solution to ensure that our community retains access to sustainable, high-quality healthcare,” Alexander said in a press release.

Danne Howard, deputy director for the Alabama Hospital Association, said that since St. Vincent’s they already had an affiliation with UAB, it was a “natural partnership.”

“It made a lot of sense for UAB to be the partner that purchased, instead of an outside entity from outside of the state,” Howard said.

Tricia Neuman, senior vice president of KFF, a health policy research and news organization, said that, on the one hand, hospital consolidation could help keep struggling hospitals open.

“When a big system merges or consolidates with a hospital, particularly one that has been struggling financially, it has the ability to bring in an infusion of funds to help the hospital operate more efficiently, to bring in more management and raise capital, all of which can help a hospital that might have been on the brink of closing remain in the community,” she said.

The downside, said Neuman, is that consolidations can lead to higher prices for services, which would be paid for by people with private insurance or the uninsured through higher co-pays or premiums.

“Because there’s less competition among hospitals when there are fewer hospitals, hospitals have a greater ability to set their own prices, and insurers have less ability to leverage lower prices because there are fewer hospitals competing for their business,” Neuman said.

Howard said she did not believe that to be true.

“I have never seen any evidence that it impacted anything materially one way or the other,” Howard said. She also said that hospitals don’t necessarily set their own prices.

Neuman said that changes in health systems due to consolidation don’t happen overnight but that people who regularly visit an acquired hospital are likely to see them over time.

“But it’s hard to predict what those changes will be,” she said.

Bulgarella said at the end of the news conference that job security for the about 5,000 providers would not be threatened and that employee compensation and benefits would remain comparable.

“Ascension St. Vincent’s caregivers and associates have served our community well since 1898,” Bulgarella said. “We are excited to honor and continue their culture and legacy, and make sure they feel secure and appreciated in this transition.”

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, an independent nonprofit website covering politics and policy in state capitals around the nation.

This article originally appeared on Montgomery Advertiser: UAB Health System to acquire Ascension St. Vincent's