Harrington, Heywood join forces to share risks
Southbridge-based Harrington HealthCare and Heywood Healthcare in Gardner have formed a new company that will allow the systems to pool and manage their patients’ care, giving them an advantage in negotiating risk-based contracts with insurers.
The company is called Community HealthCare Partners (CHP), and will be led by CEO Douglas Crapser, formerly chief operating officer at Harrington. Heywood CEO Winfield Brown will serve as chairman of the CHP board.
“This newly formed organization will strategically align both Harrington and Heywood Healthcare’s managed-care services and work to help position the two systems as a national model for community partnership and collaboration,” Moore said.
Harrington was awarded a grant of $442,303 from the state Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) to help fund the CHP rollout. The money will be used to hire staff, evaluate infrastructure resources and improve physician quality performance, as well as to educate the nearly 300 physicians Heywood and Harrington employ together.
Harrington CEO Edward Moore said in a statement that such a collaboration is unprecedented in Massachusetts. In an interview in March, Moore said Harrington and Heywood were in talks on a deal that would allow them to pool their patient populations in order to negotiate lower-cost contracts with health insurers.
Moore said drawing from a larger pool of patients would dilute risk, lowering the cost of their health care, which is beneficial as the two systems, and the health care industry at large, transition from a fee-for-service model to a system of managed care.
"My hope is that it will yield some nice results where we would mutually benefit … and be a pioneer in establishing something that was not a merger, but rather improved both of our (abilities in caring for patients)," Moore said in March.
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