The University of Mississippi Medical Center announced Monday that it will officially affiliate with Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a move that UMMC said would improve health care quality at both institutions while allowing them to cut costs.
“(Vanderbilt) and UMMC share the common goal of improving the health of the populations we serve through outstanding patient care, biomedical research and teaching,” said Dr. Charles O’Mara, associate vice chancellor for clinical affairs at UMMC.
“As the leading academic medical centers in our respective adjoining states, we also face many of the same or similar opportunities and challenges in today’s changing health care landscape. Fortunately, both institutions currently enjoy an upward trajectory on many fronts and have strengths that nicely complement one another.”
According to a press release from UMMC, the affiliation will allow the two institutions to share new clinical programs and services and provide a pathway for UMMC and Vanderbilt to formally collaborate on programs, research and, potentially, medical training through their schools.
Unlike a merger, in which one hospital system buys another, an affiliation is a looser agreement, allowing each hospital system to remain independently owned while sharing some costs and making collaboration on projects and services easier.
Although UMMC remained tight-lipped about a possible affiliation with Vanderbilt until Monday, hospital affiliations and mergers, even among bigger institutions, are increasingly common as the cost of caring for patients continues to outpace many insurance reimbursements.
In the last year alone, Mississippi Baptist merged with the Memphis-based Baptist Memorial Health Care, creating the largest hospital system in the state. The move was largely driven by the high cost of updating electronic medical records. Later last year, the county-owned OCH Regional Medical Center in Starkville survived a referendum on selling the hospital to a larger private entity, only to announce weeks later that it was considering affiliating with several private hospital systems.
In December, UMMC announced its own affiliation with the smaller Anderson Regional Medical Center in Meridian. In 2014, UMMC entered into a leasing agreement with the former Grenada Lakes Medical Center. Both mergers were largely driven by financial concerns, UMMC said at the time.
“Year after year, Southern states consistently rank near the bottom in the nation for certain health and wellness metrics,” said Dr. C. Wright Pinson, (Vanderbilt) deputy chief executive officer and chief health system officer. “This agreement creates opportunities for our organizations to develop programs and services that will benefit the communities we serve while advancing our mission to improve the health of citizens who live throughout the Southeast.”
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.