Alastair Bell, MD, CEO of Boston Medical Center, got up early on Tuesday, the first day of the post-Steward Health Care era in Massachusetts. He drove to Brockton to greet caregivers as they arrived at Good Samaritan Medical Center. In the afternoon, he was back in Boston, welcoming staffers at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center. That day, they became employees of BMC, the state's largest safety net hospital — now by a long shot. Long a healthcare anchor in the heart of Boston, the system has emerged from the Steward ashes with more than twice as many hospital beds and a regional footprint, the most essential player in the state’s rescue of Steward's tottering hospitals. Now comes the hard part: making sure the troubled hospitals it rescued can survive, and serve their patients, in the new alignment.
