Three North Carolina health systems — Vidant Health, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and WakeMed Health & Hospitals — are forming a shared services operating company.
The arrangement, void of mergers or acquisitions, will let the organizations maintain their independence and current governance structures while gaining "benefits of scale," according to the release. The company will operate under a new name, which is not yet finalized.
Greenville-based Vidant Health and Raleigh-based WakeMed each include eight hospitals, while Winston-Salem-based Wake Forest is an integrated medical campus with more than 1,000 acute-care beds.
Declining reimbursement from Medicare and Medicaid and technological changes were cited as challenges the new relationship is intended to address.