Parkview Adventist Medical Center will not merge with Central Maine Healthcare, a Lewiston-area healthcare conglomerate, in the immediate future. Brunswick’s Mid Coast Hospital has maintained its interest in partnering with Parkview.
Central Maine filed a merger in August 2012, but due to disagreements with the state of Maine, it has asked to delay its request for another year the Bangor Daily News reported.
One of the issues at the that drove the merger was the low occupancy rate at Brunswick-area hospitals.
An alternative plan would merge Parkview with Mid Coast Hospital. Mid Coast Hospital’s Steven Trockman said that the request for the suspension has had little effect on his institution.
“I do know that at Mid Coast Hospital our plans haven’t changed because of this,” he said. “We remain open to anyone in this community, Parkview included, who’d want to partner with us to improve access, to improve quality and to bring down costs and to improve wellness.”
He noted, however, that Mid Coast and Parkview are not moving forward with a deal at this time.
“We’re not forcing anything. We don’t have a proposal on the table right now,” Trockman said.
Still, Trockman argued, consolidation makes sense in the healthcare industry in general particularly in rural regions.
“There’s a lot of cost in the duplication of services and infrastructure. That’s not necessary. We’re the smallest community in the Northeast to have two hospitals, and our population doesn’t support any longer that much hospital-based healthcare,” he said. “You can see that being played out in the declining volumes of in-patient healthcare, especially at Parkview.”
Trockman could not explain Central Maine’s decision, but, he did commented on trends in the industry as a whole.
“As we get better and better at preventing injury and illness through primary care and wellness, we believe that that trend of in-patient hospital acute care will continue to decline,” he said.
To provide specifics on how consolidation would lead to savings, he offered an example and provided a precedent.
“One possibility,” he said, “would be to consolidate the acute care services into one campus to drive costs down. We were able to consolidate the Bath Memorial Hospital and the Regional Memorial Hospital in Brunswick just over a decade ago without the loss of any jobs. We became one of the lowest cost, highest quality community hospital in the state.”
Representatives from Parkview did not respond to requests for comment by press time.