As Rhode Island’s largest health system celebrates a new affiliation agreement with Brown University, the win for Lifespan Corp. and Brown could create a challenge for Care New England Health System.
Under the agreement, Lifespan will rebrand as Brown University Health later this year, although the health system and the university will remain as separate, independent entities. The terms come with more than a new name. Brown will invest a total of $150 million into Lifespan, divided into annual payments of $15 million to $25 million over seven years.
For Brown, which has long sought a larger role in the state's health care landscape, and financially strapped Lifespan, the agreement poses clear benefits, says Robert Hackey, a professor of health policy and management at Providence College.
But Care New England – the substantially smaller entity among the Ocean State’s two largest health systems, and with its own financial struggles – now has cause for even more concern, Hackey says.
“Care New England has always been the more vulnerable of the two systems, and Lifespan has clearly made a choice,” Hackey said. “And Care New England didn’t get asked to the prom.”
Care New England hasn’t always been the odd one out. Over the decades, Lifespan and Care New England have made numerous attempts to merge. And in 2021, Brown joined the two health systems in their bid to become an integrated academic health system, which Attorney General Peter F. Neronha ultimately rejected.
Care New England has said the agreement between Brown and Lifespan will not affect CNE.
Dr. Michael Wagner, CEO and president of Care New England, said his hospital group “will continue to partner with Lifespan on some initiatives and refer patients to some of their high-end subspecialties.”
In a statement, Wagner also noted that three “essential departments” at Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School – obstetrics and gynecology, psychiatry and human behavior, and family medical – are located at CNE facilities.
Care New England “will also continue to focus on our academic partnership and our unique role in providing foundational health care for all Rhode Islanders,” Wagner said.
Lifespan spokesperson Kathleen Hart, meanwhile, told PBN in a statement that "there's no change to Lifespan's relationship with CNE" under the rebranding.
Still, it’s quite a turn of events.
In 2018, as Care New England was negotiating a sale to Boston-based Partners HealthCare – now called Mass General Brigham – Brown and a California for-profit hospital chain teamed up with plans to make a rival bid. Then months later, Brown reached an agreement with Partners and Care New England to become the “primary academic research and teaching institution of record” for the two health systems if the sale happened. Partners backed out of its plans to buy Care New England in 2019 after CNE reopened merger negotiations with Lifespan and Brown.
Even with the new agreement with Lifespan, Brown University spokesperson Brian Clark says that Brown will continue to use three Care New England hospitals – Women & Infants Hospital, Kent County Memorial Hospital and Butler Hospital – for teaching, and that "the enhanced affiliation between Brown and Lifespan does not change or impact Brown’s strong affiliations with Care New England" or other affiliates.
At a news conference announcing the rebranding, Dr. Mukesh K. Jain, dean of the Alpert Medical School and senior vice president for health affairs, expressed similar sentiments, and highlighted “the important role that [Care New England plays] in many departments.”
While these specialties will protect Women & Infants and Butler hospitals from the competitive edge – for services, staffing and insurance negotiations – that Lifespan gains from Brown’s prestigious reputation, Care New England will need to reckon with the more generalized Kent Hospital as a weakness, Hackey says.
As to just how significant these consequences could be for CNE, Hackey says it’s hard to predict. But financial concerns paired with increased issues attracting staff could snowball into increased perception issues at Care New England, he says.
And "from a patient perspective, naming can matter,” Hackey said, with the agreement “indicating that [Lifespan facilities] are kind of the state’s elite hospitals.”
