Hospital network marks 1st anniversary

When Hartford HealthCare officially absorbed St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport on Oct. 1, 2019, there was palpable enthusiasm about the transition, particularly from Jeffrey A. Flaks, president and chief executive officer of Hartford HealthCare.

“I couldn’t be more excited about this,” he said at the time, during a walk-through at St. Vincent’s.

Thursday marks the one-year anniversary of the acquisition and, while Flaks’ zeal for the partnership hasn’t changed, he acknowledges that this was a tough year to begin a business transition such as this one.

In March, the COVID-19 pandemic hit Connecticut hard, and hospitals throughout the state struggled to manage and treat the new and puzzling illness.

“I think the most immediate problem was taking care of an illness that none of us had a history in,” said Vincent DiBattista, Senior Vice President for Hartford HealthCare and President of the Fairfield Region. “Those first 30 days, there was a lot of trial and error on the best course of care.”

DiBattista is the leader at St. Vincent’s and he and Flaks agreed having a pandemic hit in the first year of the new partnership was unprecedented and scary. But both said the crisis highlighted the advantages of having a statewide health system, as St. Vincent’s could share resources with other hospitals and health facilities in the system.

“We could never have predicted the pandemic, but we’re certainly grateful for the way our team responded to it,” Flaks said.

St. Vincent’s path to acquisition began in spring 2018, when it was first announced that Missouri-based Ascension health — which owned St. Vincent’s at the time — had signed a deal for the hospital to be acquired by Hartford HealthCare.

DiBattista said that handling the pandemic “meant a lot of us having to work a little harder and do double duty. In the early days, deaths were a lot higher than any of us had ever encountered, and that was tough.”