SoutheastHEALTH and Mercy Deal A 'Strategic Opportunity'

Mercy's SVP and chief strategic ventures officer, Ajay Pathak, details how the organization's plans to join together may impact the health systems, their patients, and their employees.

At the end of January, Missouri-based nonprofit health systems Mercy and SoutheastHEALTH announced they had signed a letter of intent to "join together."

If the deal succeeds, SoutheastHEALTH would join the Mercy health system as a full member, with the intent of making SoutheastHEALTH a "regional hub in southeast Missouri and the greater tri-state area it serves," the system's president and CEO, Ken Bateman, said in a press release.

"Mercy is the best strategic fit for both entities and this vision. With a proven track record in community health, Mercy fully supports strengthening access to affordable primary and specialty health care for all residents in the communities we serve," Bateman said.

"We look forward to the opportunity to provide even more access to high-quality, lower-cost health care for the Cape Girardeau community," president and CEO of Mercy, Steve Mackin, said in a press release. "By joining together, we will utilize Mercy's extensive network of resources and services to further position SoutheastHEALTH as the regional hub for industry-leading health care. We are very excited to have the potential to serve in this part of Missouri."

In a recent interview with HealthLeaders, Mercy's SVP and chief strategic ventures officer, Ajay Pathak, MBA, MPH, shared how the organizations believe the deal will benefit both health systems, their communities, and their employees.

"For Mercy to get called in by Southeast and have an opportunity to partner with them, align with them, and provide care to the Cape Girardeau region in Missouri and the geography beyond … that's something that we're incredibly excited about," Pathak told HealthLeaders. "We can all recognize from our executive level on down through our care teams the value of being able to align with an organization and come together."

Keeping costs low

"Mercy is a healthcare ministry and organization that has always been focused on our patients and seeing the person in every patient," Pathak said. "In every community that we serve, we are the high-quality provider as well as the lowest cost provider. In many senses [that's] the calling card for Mercy; how we best serve our communities to provide the highest quality care, but yet do that from a cost of care perspective that's helping meet the needs of our community, our patients, consumers of health care, employees, [and] employers in those communities."

"We see this opportunity with SoutheastHEALTH to partner with them around their tradition of high-quality healthcare [and] bring that total cost of care model and some scale and size to be able to impact patients. That's where we feel this relationship is really going to have its greatest impact, is in the community," he said.

Workforce benefits

"Employees of Southeast now know that they're part of a broader and a bigger network of care across not just the state of Missouri, but across a large geography of the Midwest," Pathak said. Southeast's workforce will "have clinical resources, colleagues, clinical councils, and best practices to tap into, that's going to be a great opportunity for them to expand, grow, come together, and build a network."

"This relationship is predicated on a strategic opportunity to serve this community and grow services and build access; we see a very strong growth opportunity in the region," he added.

The next steps

"We're working very actively towards the definitive agreement. As we get to the end of the calendar year, bringing this relationship formally to an integration, the teams will continue to step through the processes together," Pathak said.

"SoutheastHEALTH's board, leadership team, physicians, and employees [were] very engaged and active in ultimately choosing who was the right partner. We're excited for the work in front of us over the next several months as we work to help them become part of our Mercy healthcare system and our ministry, and ultimately support the strategy they have around growing access in the community in Cape Girardeau."