Philadelphia residents will be spared the loss of another safety-net hospital. A group of local health systems led by Penn Medicine and Public Health Management Corp. announced this week that they will join forces to revive the 153-bed Mercy Hospital in West Philly.
Mercy Philadelphia Hospital notified city officials in February that it planned to wind down its operations, but Penn Medicine had begun talks with its current owner, Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic, about ways to buoy the hospital and take over its operations as early as last fall, on the heels of the closure of Hahnemann University Hospital.
PHMC will own the building, and Penn Medicine will run the emergency department, inpatient medical and behavioral health beds as a satellite site of the Hospital of University of Pennsylvania. Independence Blue Cross will also assist with programming. Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic will continue to operate the Mercy Senior Center.
Since it announced its intention to close the hospital, Trinity Health had begun winding down inpatient operations there. The emergency room, which saw about 48,000 visits a year, remained open, but Trinity cut 100 employees from its 900-person rolls. Penn plans to keep the remaining 800 employed either at Mercy or another hospital in the University of Pennsylvania Health System.
Trinity will continue to run the Mercy location until March 2021. After the transition, Penn will run 33 emergency room bays, 30 to 60 short-stay inpatient beds, and 40 to 50 behavioral health beds. PHMC will operate a “healthy village,” which will address social determinants of health such as housing and employment.
One of the largest Catholic, nonprofit health systems in the country, Trinity also operates St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne, Mercy Catholic Medical Center in Darby, Nazareth Hospital in Northeast Philadelphia, and St. Francis Healthcare in Wilmington.