Ink drying on Southampton-Stony Brook deal
Southampton Hospital-Stony Brook merger is poised for completion as last steps are under way after almost two years of exploration.
One down, two to go — well almost. The ink isn’t quite dry, but Southampton Hospital, one of three East End hospitals, has received approval from SUNY trustees to merge with Stony Brook University Hospital.The East End’s other two hospitals — Eastern Long Island and Peconic Bay Medical Center — continue talks with both Stony Brook and North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System.
Approval of the Southampton Hospital deal has been unanimously recommended by a four-member Academic Medical Centers and Hospital Committee and a formal vote today by the full 18-member SUNY board moved the agreement forward with approvals now needed only from the State Department of Health and the attorney general and comptroller to put the final pen to paper closing the deal that has been in the works since 2012.
The deal calls for Southampton to lease its facilities to Stony Brook.
While the Southampton Board of Directors would remain in place, current hospital president and CEO Robert Chaloner would become a Stony Brook employee as chief administrator of the facility.
When the pending deal was made public last October, it brought to a head the financial difficulties the three East End hospitals have been having.
Despite an effort by the three to streamline their services so they would be complementary and not competitive with one another, the East End Health Alliance they formed was too small in today’s medical industry to survive long term.
That all three began merger talks with other organizations is something going on around the country as large medical centers gobble up the smaller entities.
“Community hospitals like us” can’t survive without partnerships that involved aligning with academic medical centers, ELIH president and CEO Paul Connor said last fall.
Although he speculated a deal could be done sometime this spring, just as the Stony Brook-Southampton merger has taken much longer than originally expected, it’s likely the other two hospitals will take longer to decide where to align and then to solidify their deals.
