Anniversary of hospital merger arrives amid pandemic
St. Vincent’s Medical Center became part of Hartford HealthCare a year ago
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 walkthrough at St. Vincent’s.
Thursday marks the one-year anniversary of the acquisition and, while Flaks’s 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 Missouribased Ascension health — which owned St. Vincent’s at the time — had signed a deal for the hospital to be acquired by Hartford HealthCare.
The merger was not a case of a small hospital being swallowed by a large chain, as Ascension is the largest nonprofit health system in the country.
Still, Hartford was a major chain that included six hospitals, even before the acquisition of St. Vincent’s. Now the system has 400 locations and more than 30,000 employees across the state.
St. Vincent’s was also Hartford HealthCare’s first holding in Fairfield County — a fact that took on added significance when the pandemic hit.
Fairfield County was an epicenter of COVID in the state, and, as St. Vincent’s is HHC’s only hospital in Fairfield County, there was a focus on making sure the
facility didn’t get overwhelmed.
“Initially, St. Vincent’s was impacted disproportionately to the rest of the state,” Flaks said.
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.”
But because St. Vincent’s was part of Hartford HealthCare, the other hospitals in the system could help bear the weight of what the Bridgeport hospital was seeing, the men said.
Staff and equipment could be moved to St. Vincent’s from other facilities when needed, and patients could be moved from St. Vincent’s to Hartford’s other holdings, Flaks said.
“Because of this, St. Vincent’s never had a true capacity issue,” Flaks said.
Of course, no hospitals emerged from the first COVID surge unscathed, and DiBattista and Flaks both said patient volume and revenue suffered at their hospitals because of the pandemic.
DiBattista said urgent care visits and emergency room visits are still down, which he attributed to lingering fears about COVID.
“That to me is really a sign of hesitancy on the part of the community to come to a hospital,” he said.
But other areas have bounced back, he said, including elective surgeries.
Flaks also was quick to point out that the pandemic isn’t over, and that “vigilance and focus” are still needed. However, in general, he viewed the first year of partnership as a success.
“Understandably, this was an unprecedented event,” he said. “(But) our health system has been developed to respond to events like this.”