(TNS) — A for-profit California company has reached an agreement to acquire a bankrupt Mercer County hospital that was scheduled to close Monday.
“Good news for the new year,” Sharon Regional Medical Center President Bob Rogalski wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday. “I have been contacted by Radha Savitala, the CEO of Tenor Health Partners. She reported that an agreement in principle has been reached between Tenor Health Partners and Medical Properties Trust to assume the operations of Sharon Regional Medical Center.
“I can’t thank you enough for hanging in there with us during these difficult times.”
Dallas-based Steward Health System LLC is the 31-hospital chain that declared bankruptcy in May and owns Sharon Regional. Medical Properties Trust Inc. is the Birmingham, Ala.-based investment company that owns all of the hospital’s real estate. Steward’s creditors have not yet endorsed the deal.
If approved, Pasadena-based Tenor would be the third for-profit owner of the struggling 80-bed hospital since 2014. The deal could save some 850 jobs and critical heart care services that are not available elsewhere in rural Mercer County.
Neither Rogalski nor Savitala, an attorney with extensive health care experience, were available for comment Thursday. But Tenor’s website indicates the company targets struggling hospitals for partnerships and acquisitions.
“When hospitals with good intentions get derailed, we save them,” according to the company’s website. “Tenor was established to ensure that financially struggling hospitals can survive and thrive across the cities and suburbs of America.”
As of April, Tenor did not own any hospitals, according to a company proposal to assume control of a medical facility in North Carolina.
Sharon Regional, which operated as a nonprofit until 2014, traces its history back 125 years, but it’s uncertain how the agreement will affect plans to close it.
Sharon Regional’s emergency room stopped admitting patients weeks ago and patients were being moved to other facilities in preparation for the scheduled closure Monday. The shutdown was also approved Dec. 27 by U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas Judge Christopher Lopez, an order sought by Steward’s creditors.
A hearing on a petition by the state attorney general that had been scheduled Friday in Mercer County Court that could’ve kept the hospital open has been continued for the second time in as many months.
Meanwhile, the city of Sharon has been focusing on helping three entities that have expressed interest in acquiring the hospital, according to city manager Robert G. Fiscus. In addition to Tenor, the Post-Gazette identified Flint, Mich.-based Insight Health System, and Yates Medical Group LLC of Miami Lakes, Florida as the other interested parties.
“We know it’s very complex; we know it’s going to be challenging,” Mr. Fiscus said about keeping the community asset operating. “But as a city we can’t imagine a situation where there are three interested parties that want to purchase the hospital and it would close.”
