One year after Cleveland Clinic bought Mercy Hospital, upgrades center on staff, facility

It’s been a full year since Mercy Hospital in Stark County was acquired by health care giant Cleveland Clinic, in a deal that was in the works since 2019 and persisted through the still ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Cleveland Clinic has made investments in facility upgrades and hiring, including new trauma and cardiac surgeons as well as a second oncologist, at the 476-bed hospital that first opened its doors to Stark-area patients in 1911 under the leadership of the Sisters of Charity of St. Augustine.

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Cleveland Clinic Mercy President Dr. Timothy Crone said that by this time in 2023, Cleveland Clinic will have invested $70 million in Mercy Hospital. That money, he said, doesn't account for investments in physician recruiting, but is the level of investment in infrastructure and system improvements.

The acquisition process kicked off back in Sept. 2019 when Mercy signed a letter of intent to join the Cleveland Clinic system but was slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic. In February 2021, when Crone said he and other health officials believed the pandemic was coming to an end, the deal was solidified, only to be hit later in the year with the worst season of the pandemic to date.

"Things really are starting to look and feel different around the Mercy facilities in an environment where we were nervous about how possible that was going to be, and it's just very exciting and very gratifying to see some of those changes," Crone said.

Despite pandemic challenges, 2021 was a major year for the Clinic

2021 was a big year for the Cleveland Clinic system.

As part of its annual state of the clinic address, the company reported the “strongest financial performance and the highest clinical activity ever recorded” in the system’s 100-year history, with a total operating revenue of $12.4 billion and operating income of $746 million.

The Mercy acquisition was part of the Clinic's strategy to widen its network across Ohio. In 2018, Cleveland Clinic bought Union Hospital in Dover, and prior to that, in 2015, it acquired Akron General. The Clinic has not disclosed what it paid to purchase Mercy.

While the president of the Summit County Medical Society told the Canton Repository last year that the Akron General acquisition was "turbulent," Crone said that bringing Mercy into the Cleveland Clinic fold has been smooth, with little to no physician attrition outside of regular retirement and end-of-contract turnover.

A representative from the Stark County Medical Society could not be reached for comment for this story.

"Mercy is, at least so far, kind of an archetype of how you want these integrations to go," Crone said. "We have worked very hard to partner with and not disrupt private practices in the community."

As part of the Clinic's approach to hospital acquisition, it intends to bring more specialists to Mercy Hospital to build out special service access in the region so patients don't necessarily have to travel outside of their county for medical care.

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Crone said over the next five years, the system has budgeted to bring 41 net new specialty physician recruits to Mercy. He said that, as a physician-led hospital, they try to "supplement" rather than supplant the local doctors in the county.

In particular, he named hand surgery, orthopedic foot and ankle surgery and the hospital's new cardiac surgery program as areas that will be more robust compared to the past.

"Over the next three to four years, through both leveraging resources from the Akron system and tighter connections to main campus, we'll have specialty services available here that aren't available here now," Crone said.

In the immediate future, the next big improvement coming to Mercy under the Clinic umbrella is getting on the same electronic health records program, specifically Epic Systems, as the rest of the Clinic network, which will allow patient records to be transferred as needed to physicians across the various campuses.

Looking ahead, Crone said, his expectation is that Mercy will continue to integrate more deeply into the Cleveland Clinic's systems and culture.

"As we work to better support employees – with fair wages, better benefits packages, career advancement opportunities – the return on that investment that we see is better engagement, more professionalism, and a higher degree of safety, quality and high reliability," Crone said.

Sam Zern can be reached at szern@cantonrep.com or 330-580-8322. You can also find her on Twitter at @sam_zern.

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Mercy acquisition part of record financial year for Cleveland Clinic