Leaders from the state and the University of Connecticut recently started discussions to purchase three local hospital facilities — Waterbury, Bristol and Day Kimball in Putnam — to add to its healthcare system. The new sites would complement UConn’s John Dempsey Hospital in Farmington.
“As Connecticut’s only public academic medical center, we are committed to meeting the state’s health care needs,” said John Driscoll, chair of the UConn Health board of directors in a statement. “By joining with other hospitals, we will build a new, high value health system that will benefit patients and communities across the state while strengthening UConn Health.”
The three properties would enhance UConn Heath’s ability to compete with other hospital networks, such as Hartford Healthcare, Yale-New Haven Health and Trinity New England, which each own or partner with multiple regional facilities.
“The potential partnerships that are being explored are about two things: strengthening UConn’s long-term fiscal health and making sure that different communities in Connecticut have access to public health and care,” Sean Scanlon, state comptroller, said to reporters.
It’s a move that comes after a state report that said UConn Health needs to generate more money from patient care.
“There will be opportunit[ies] to solve UConn Health’s lack of scale and profitability through partnering its patient care enterprise with another health system,” the report said.
State Senator Saud Anwar, who chairs the state’s public health committee, said the potential acquisition would provide a better environment to help fight the state’s health care workforce shortages.
“The [proposed merger] benefits care not only in these individual hospitals but in Connecticut at large,” he said.
Waterbury Hospital, the largest facility in the proposal at 357 beds, is currently operated by Prospect Medical Holdings, who filed for bankruptcy in January. Each hospital reportedly has mounting debt.
The Waterbury site alone reportedly could cost over $500 million — a budgetary concern that lawmakers have become worried about.
“We have concerns about the terms of the proposed deal,” six lawmakers wrote in a bipartisan letter sent to UConn Health. “We can only support an acquisition and renovation agreement if it includes a clear provision for the State to take on the associated debt service.”
The rest of Prospect’s Connecticut portfolio — the Eastern Connecticut Health Network, comprising Rockville General and Manchester Memorial hospitals — are set to be acquired by Hartford Healthcare for $86 million.
“We see Waterbury as a foundational step as we set up a Connecticut hospital system,” Driscoll said. “Waterbury fits in that plan. The others, [Rockville General and Manchester Memorial] do not.”
UConn’s other proposed interests, Bristol Hospital and Day Kimball Medical Center in Putnam, are both independently owned and sized at around 100 beds each.
Over the last ten years, Day Kimball has tried establishing relationships with certain networks, including Hartford Healthcare, Yale-New Haven Health and a planned merger with Covenant Health, but they never materialized.
“As we know, the healthcare landscape is changing fast — in Connecticut and across the
nation,” Day Kimball said in 2015, pending the Hartford deal. “In this challenging environment, healthcare organizations are more likely to thrive when they create formal partnerships to work together.”
Waterbury Hospital, Bristol Hospital and the two Eastern Connecticut Health Network sites were to be acquired by a joint venture between Yale-New Haven and Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare circa 2014 in a deal that fell through.
“The one thing that all of this change is pointing to as a viable solution is scale,” Trip Pilgrim, then Tenet’s vice president of corporate development, told the Yale Daily News when the acquisition was announced. “Hospitals and health care have been a cottage industry for years, and we’re getting to the point where you can’t do that. You need to be able to look for…ways to be more efficient in delivering the care.”
Yale-New Haven Health tried again to acquire Prospect’s holdings in 2022.
No formal schedule or allocation has been proposed for the UConn acquisitions, but the new system would reportedly be called the “Connecticut Healthcare System, powered by UConn Health.”
While UConn Health is primarily based at John Dempsey Hospital in Farmington, the system operates a number of specialized and general care facilities statewide — including an urgent care location near the main UConn campus in Storrs-Mansfield.
UConn Health is also a member of the Value Care Alliance, a consortium of state healthcare systems committed to lowering healthcare costs; is affiliated with Hartford Hospital and the Hospital of Central Connecticut, Saint Francis Medical Center and Connecticut Children’s Medical Center; and has collaborated on health initiatives with other providers.