Trinity Health, Heritage Provider Network Announce Joint Venture

The deal calls for the partners to build care networks that will use new models for primary care, care management, hospitalists, long-term care, and high-risk clinics to improve and coordinate care.

Trinity Health System, an 86-hospital system active across 21 states, is joining forces with the 34,000-physician Heritage Provider Network to provide population health management in select markets throughout the country.

The joint venture, will be called Trinity Health Partners.

"Trinity Health's strategic plan calls for us to become a people-centered health system that extends beyond just providing acute and post-acute care," Richard J. Gilfillan, MD, president and CEO of Trinity Health said Monday. Based in Livonia, MI, Trinity is one of the nation's largest Catholic health systems. 

The deal calls for the partners to build care networks that will use new models for primary care, care management, hospitalist, long-term care, and high-risk clinics to improve and coordinate care. Financial details were not disclosed.

"This joint venture allows us to rapidly expand our capabilities to contract with payer-partners for full-risk, capitated arrangements that will result in better health, better care, and lower costs in the communities we serve," Gilfillan said.

"We have 4,000 primary care physicians and 30,000 specialty physicians in 100 hospitals, and for years, have always wanted a hospital partner, so it would be an integrated system with both hospitals and physicians," said Richard Merkin, MD, president and CEO of Marina del Rey, CA-based Heritage Provider Network.

Adding Population Health
"Hospitals have not embraced that concept, but fortunately for us, we have developed a relationship with Trinity, who will embrace the 21st century, working collaboratively so that we will be able to work as an integrated system with all of their hospitals."

Trinity already has 27 ACOs operating in 21 different markets, in both commercial ACOs and Medicare shared savings arrangements. "We have built clinically integrated networks to support those ACOs, and we put in place some population health management infrastructure," Gilfillan said.

"This is about taking that to the next level and saying we're going to build networks supported by the capabilities and infrastructure that Heritage has to actually go beyond that, to say now we'll enter into capitated full-risk arrangements with payer partners.

"Systems talk about how they have hospitalists, primary care physician offices, specialists, and home healthcare agencies. What we don't have is a systematic, engineered infrastructure, an approach in established clinical protocols and clinical ways of interacting with patients and each other to coordinate care across all those different sites. So what most immediately Heritage is bringing is experience—35 years of developing those capabilities."

In addition, Heritage brings Trinity needed experience in measuring and driving improvements in metrics that demonstrate outcomes, Gilfillan said. He was the first director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.

Although Heritage currently operates primarily in four states, the new joint venture could result in it acquiring physicians on a nationwide basis. "We've been recruiting and training and have an educational program that we've been developing over the past six months particularly and specifically for this program," Merkin said.

"We're looking forward to the opportunity to bring these capabilities to our marketplaces and to work with physicians, community care providers, nurse-led clinics, other hospital systems, and then payers, to really, we think, meet the full promise of the opportunity that's before us," Gilfillan said.

Not a Merger
He flatly denied the joint venture was in any way a step toward an outright merger of the two organizations.

"I can give you a simple answer to that," Gilfillan said. "That's no. This is what it says it is, a joint venture partnership, to pursue the opportunity to deliver great care in a much broader way than either of us has been able to do in the past."

Trinity has annual operating revenues of about $13.6 billion and assets of about $19.3 billion. Trinity Health employs about 89,000 people, including 3,300 physicians.

In addition to 12 owned IPAs, the Heritage family of companies, includes 52 staff model medical group sites and hospice, home health, and surgery center companies. HPN and its affiliates operate in California, New York, and Arizona and provide health care to over 1 million individuals.