St. Peter’s Health and Billings Clinic-Logan Health announced a non-merger partnership on Tuesday, with an aim of exchanging specialists and resources to keep Montana patients closer to home and reduce physician burnout.
However, the specifics are still unclear, each hospital’s CEO said. The hospitals would “explore partnering” through the next six to nine months, focusing on ways to reduce inefficiency, as St. Peter’s Health’s Wade Johnson and Billings Clinic’s Dr. Clint Seger put it.
One vision of that involves sharing specialists, sending Helena physicians to meet with Billings patients and vice versa to prevent patients from traveling out of state from either hospital. Between Billings Clinic’s 25 locations and St. Peter’s service to five counties, the partnership would hopefully reduce travel costs for patients and speed up care, the officials said.
“Especially in a state like Montana, that's distributed, that's dispersed,” Seger said.
Long term, Seger sees this as a way to reduce strain on Montana medical professionals. It’s daunting to be told you are the sole specialist on call in your system for an entire year, he said. Sometimes, the burden even runs talented employees out of state.
With fellow specialists now ready to be tapped, whether they be based in Helena or Billings, a partnership can reduce strain and make Montana more attractive to incoming physicians, Johnson said.
“This idea of being on an island somewhere is not attractive to today's physicians,” Johnson said. “They want colleagues and they want support.”
St. Peter’s Health employees were informed about the partnership at a noon meeting on Tuesday.
Although St. Peter’s has faced financial hardship since COVID-19, Johnson said the partnership was not a cost-saving measure.
“Do we demonstrate our stewardship by being mindful of costs and having internal conversations about how we need to manage those and tightening our belts? 100% true,” Johnson said. “But if you look at the overall financial health of St. Peter's and where we are today, what we have in the bank, et cetera, we are considered a very healthy organization from a financial perspective. As are our colleagues here.”
Johnson also said the move was not meant for St. Peter's to depend on Billings Clinic, which has over 9,000 employees, including 1,200 physicians and advanced practice providers working in 80 specialties.
“There’s this sharing that’s moving both ways,” Johnson said.
Updates will be broadcast as the partnership takes shape, Johnson and Seger said.