The proposed partnership between Swedish Health Services and Providence Health and Services is being closely followed by The Everett Clinic. Today the President of The Everett Clinic, Dr. Harold Dash and CEO Rick Cooper issued the following statement to My Everett News…
“The announcement of a proposed Providence Health System and Swedish Health Services merger is significant and has the potential to impact the Puget Sound healthcare market. Consolidation in healthcare is occurring rapidly, but it is not clear whether this type of consolidation will improve quality and value for patients.
Over the next several months The Everett Clinic will carefully evaluate how this proposed merger could affect the market and our patients. We will fully participate in the regulatory review process.
This will not change The Everett Clinic’s focus on improving quality and value in healthcare. Our goal is to lower the cost of healthcare for patients, employers and health plans, by 25 percent over the next five years.
We have successfully demonstrated our ability to achieve this goal through management of chronic disease, careful use of prescription medications and improving access to preventive care. We believe these approaches provide the best opportunity to lower healthcare costs over the long term and raise the quality of patient care”.
There still aren’t a lot of details about the partnership between Swedish and Providence. The Seattle Times has a good overview of what’s known so far.
Earlier this year Providence was airing attack ads on the radio and print ads in the paper blasting Swedish over who had the better emergency room. Looks like they’ll have to drop the challenges is they want to have a successful partnership.
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October 6, 2011
Everett, Everett Economy