Dive Brief:
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Steward Health Care and IASIS Healthcare announced a definitive agreement to merge, which would create a system with 36 hospitals across 10 states, managed care operations in Arizona, Utah and Massachusetts, and projected revenues of nearly $8 billion in 2018, according to Steward Health Care.
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After the $2 billion deal Steward will become the largest private for-profit hospital operator in the country.
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Steward made its first out of state acquisitions last month when it bought eight hospitals in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.
Dive Insight:
The merger is part of an ongoing trend that also recently included a Geisinger and Jersey Shore deal. Steward and Community Health Systems (CHS) also announced earlier this month that Boston-based Steward purchased eight CHS hospitals. These moves show Steward attempting to become a bigger player in the competitive for-profit hospital industry.
While Steward is rapidly increasing its footprints, other large for-profit hospital systems like CHS and Tenet are divesting hospitals, as they face financial issues, including flat or lost revenue in the first quarter of the year, and mounting debt.
The deal will give Steward nearly 7,500 patient beds across 10 states and about 38,000 employees, including “more than 1,800 directly employed multi-specialty physicians and several thousand aligned physicians," according to Steward Health Care.
The deal also means Steward will begin overseeing the Health Choice managed care operations with more than 680,000 members, which will bring Steward’s managed care and health insurance products to more than 1.1 million members.
Steward now runs large and community hospitals, including St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, Carney Hospital and New England Sinai Hospital in Massachusetts; Northside Medical Center and Trumbull Memorial Hospital in Ohio; and Wuesthoff Medical Center in Florida.