Last week, Ellis Medicine CEO Paul Milton announced that a proposed merger between the Schenectady hospital and St. Peter’s Health Partners would not move forward.
Just days later, Albany Medical Center announced it would explore a future relationship with Ellis.
Daily Gazette healthcare reporter Chad Arnold discussed the developments further with WAMC's Lucas Willard.
Chad Arnold: So, a little background, Ellis Medicine and St. Peter's have been kind of exploring this proposed merger for the last six years or so. It seems like things were going well in recent years, but earlier this spring, the Ellis Board of Trustees announced that it's going to kind of put out a request for proposals, kind of see what other partnerships might be out there. They kind of cited the changing landscape in healthcare and their fiduciary duties as well as that, and at the time, St. Peter's was expected to be a participant in that. But about a month later, Paul Milton announced to staff that St. Peter's would not be participating in that process and that any merger talks would be kind of ending. And so that kind of opened the door, and earlier this week, it was announced that Albany Med Health System has expressed interest in a potential partnership, a strategic partnership, with Ellis Medicine. So that is kind of an ongoing talk right now. I sat down earlier this week and I talked with Paul Milton, and he wouldn't really get into any details about that. He wouldn't even say how many ... organizations have, you know, expressed interest in a partnership with Ellis Medicine, but he basically said all options are on the table.
Lucas Willard: Very much in the preliminary sort of phase right now.
CA: Absolutely.
LW: And Albany Med has expanded over the years. I mean, just for one example, Saratoga Hospital is now part of the Albany Med Health System. You have Columbia [Memorial] Hospital in Hudson, that's also part of it. So, Albany Med has gotten larger over the years, so this is not something that's, I guess, totally foreign. I do have questions about what's going to happen with employees at Ellis. I understand that Ellis did make mention of sort of what's in the immediate future after the talks with St. Peter's fell through, but what is the hospital saying?
CA: Yeah, so Ellis and St. Peters, when they started to kind of explore this potential merger in 2021, entered into a pair of service agreements — one's a management service, another was a physician service agreement. So basically, under these agreements, some physicians that were under the Ellis umbrella were moved under the umbrella of St. Peter's Health Partners. And that process is kind of, they're starting to be moved back under the umbrella, basically, back onto the payroll of Ellis Medicine. Paul Milton has said that "we have a home for all these physicians." He's not expecting any major turnover or anything like that [and] no disruption in care for patients at this point. He says, really kind of just behind-the-scenes paperwork issues, and it shouldn't take long. I mean, these partnerships are effectively going to come to the end Aug. 16, so that gives them about 60 days to kind of get this all untangled.
LW: And I'm also curious about the Bellevue Women's Center in Schenectady, which is under the Ellis ownership. There is some community concern about what's going to happen to that facility. Has Ellis said anything about Bellevue in recent days, as new discussions with Albany Medical Center are now underway?
CA: Yeah, Paul Milton was very adamant when I sat down with him earlier this week that ... he wants to keep all the existing services, and he's very much standing behind Bellevue; he expected no changes at that center. There's been concerns in recent years, particularly as talks with St. Peter's and Ellis kind of continued over the years, that there would be a loss of reproductive health services in Schenectady County, due to the fact that St. Peter's was a religious-affiliated organization. A lot of people have raised concerns, and in recent years, I think the last year or so, Ellis Medicine started to kind of move the surgical procedures from the Bellevue campus to the main campus on Nott Street in Schenectady. And that kind of, for many community members, including the nurses union, they really raised concerns that this might be kind of a precursor to kind of closing this facility in the future. But the Ellis administration has always kind of pushed back on that, and said this was just really an efficiency thing about kind of just, you know, getting, you know, cutting costs and finding just the revenue as they kind of work their way through some financial straits, and that they stand behind it. And he's [Milton] still standing behind that today.
