Tufts Medical Center, Boston, and Lowell (Mass.) General Hospital are partnering to form a health system to encourage collaboration between academic teaching hospitals and community-based providers.
Under the new arrangement, the two not-for-profit organizations and their physician groups—Tufts' New England Quality Care Alliance and the Lowell General Physician Hospital Organization—will continue to operate independently. But as part of an as-yet unnamed parent company, Tufts and Lowell are expected to benefit from improved scale for population health data management, group purchasing efficiencies and development of new services, according to a release on the deal.
“We know from experience that strong hospitals and physician groups like ours seek the scale necessary to leverage collaborative technologies and data sharing that allow us to improve access to affordable, high quality healthcare for the communities we serve,” Lowell CEO Normand Deschene said in a release. “We believe the market is hungry for this type of value-driven system.”
