PeaceHealth, a Bellevue-based hospital chain in merger negotiations with Vancouver’s Southwest Washington Health System, is considering Clark County as a site for a new central location for many of its back-office employees and services, officials at the nonprofit said Monday.
“Clark County is one of the few areas we’re looking at,” said Peter Adler, senior vice president and chief strategy officer for PeaceHealth, adding that “we’re definitely looking at Vancouver.”
The PeaceHealth board of directors is expected by late June to make a final decision on a plan that would create what the organization calls a shared services center. The services center could house a variety of departments, including accounting, finance, information technology, health care information management, patient financial services and payroll.
Details of the plan are few. It’s unclear, for example, whether it would create new jobs or move them to Clark County from other areas, or do some combination of both. Adler said PeaceHealth is still putting together a “high-level” analysis that will fully outline the plan for the services center, including addressing jobs, which departments it will house and when it would set up shop.
“This is to support growth,” Adler said, “so I would not say today there would be no new jobs.”
PeaceHealth spokesman Brien Lautman said it’s too early to say how much the services center will cost or whether it will be built as a new structure or occupy existing office space. He also didn’t specify how much office space would be required.
PeaceHealth’s services center plan comes after it announced in March that it was negotiating a merger with Southwest Washington Health System, a smaller nonprofit that operates Clark County’s largest hospital, the Southwest Washington Medical Center, with 3,500 employees. The merger, which officials hope to finalize by the end of this year, is intended to cut costs, achieve efficiencies, and improve and grow services.
The merger would create a health company with about $2 billion in revenues, 464 physicians and hospitals from Ketchikan, Alaska, to Cottage Grove, Ore., allowing Southwest to benefit by sharing its costs with a larger hospital chain.
Adler said PeaceHealth’s consideration of Clark County for a new services center fits into the overall plan to merge with Southwest. “Obviously, it’s a growing community and one that is projected to continue growing,” he said. Adler said the services center plan would be contingent on a successful merger.
Ken Cole, a spokesman for Southwest, said merger negotiations are “moving along as scheduled in a very positive direction. We’re basically in a detailed information sharing stage.”
The merger must clear the boards of both PeaceHealth and Southwest, as well as several state and federal agencies ,before it can be finalized. So far, no formal request for the transaction has been submitted to the Washington State Department of Health, which evaluates hospital expansions and ownership changes. The merger also will need approval from the Washington state Office of the Attorney General, and the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, Adler said.
In Clark County, Southwest operates the Southwest Washington Medical Center hospital campus at 400 N.E. Mother Joseph Place, off Mill Plain Boulevard in Vancouver, as well as the Memorial Hospital campus in downtown Vancouver, clinics in the Salmon Creek and Fisher’s Landing areas, a physicians group, a residency program, a charitable foundation, a health plan for Medicaid patients and an outpatient surgery center.
PeaceHealth, a Catholic-sponsored nonprofit health system, operates seven hospitals in Oregon, Washington and Alaska, including its chief regional medical center, Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend in Springfield, Ore. The nonprofit employs more than 11,000 people and operates five hospitals in Alaska, Oregon and Washington, including the St. John Medical Center in Longview.
