Two giants of the Colorado healthcare market — hospital systems AdventHealth and Intermountain Health — announced Tuesday that they are coupling up.
The systems said they have signed a letter of intent to pursue a joint venture that would combine all five of AdventHealth’s Denver-area hospitals with three of Intermountain’s hospitals in the Denver metro area.
After the joint venture is formed, AdventHealth will take over management and day-to-day operations of Intermountain’s Good Samaritan Hospital in Lafayette, Lutheran Hospital in Wheat Ridge and Platte Valley Hospital in Brighton. The affiliation also includes all of the hospitals’ associated physician practices and clinics, as well as AdventHealth’s freestanding emergency rooms and urgent cares.
“Partnering with Intermountain Health represents an opportunity to build on our shared commitment to deliver high-quality, compassionate care,” David Banks, the president and CEO of AdventHealth, said in a statement.
“We are excited about the prospect of a joint venture that would expand access to high-quality care and create a more connected experience for patients and care teams across the greater Denver area,” Intermountain President and CEO Rob Allen added, also in a statement.
It is unclear whether this joint venture will operate under a new name. It is also unclear whether the partnership will lead to layoffs or consolidation of various administration, medical record or tech systems. Spokespeople for AdventHealth and Intermountain Health declined to elaborate or make executives available for interviews.
The partnership comes at a turbulent time in Colorado’s hospital market, as rising costs place hospitals under financial strain and changes to federal Medicaid and health insurance funding create even more worry. On top of that, both systems are coming out of recent, high-profile breakups.
AdventHealth split with CommonSpirit Health in 2023 when their joint venture — which was called Centura Health — fractured. Intermountain Health, meanwhile, was recently dumped by healthcare provider and insurer Kaiser Permanente, which took its contracts and considerable patient population to competing suitors, most notably HCA HealthONE.
AdventHealth, which is based in Florida, has more than 100,000 employees across more than 2,000 care sites nationwide. Intermountain, based in Utah, is smaller with 4,600 employees at 34 hospitals and more than 400 clinics.
Intermountain only came to Colorado in 2022, when it merged with SCL Health, taking over the five Colorado hospitals that SCL managed. SCL Health was a Catholic-affiliated system, meaning its hospitals followed Catholic health directives.
Of those hospitals, though, only Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver and St. Mary’s Medical Center in Grand Junction continue to follow the Catholic directives, according to Intermountain. Those two hospitals are not included in the joint venture with AdventHealth, though it is unclear why.