After a three-year-long process, Long Island Community Hospital has completed its merger with Manhattan-based NYU Langone Health.
Hospital officials said the Patchogue hospital with 306 beds has also changed its name to NYU Langone Hospital — Suffolk, effective March 1. The heath system announced the merger’s completion Monday.
Long Island Community Hospital began its merger with Langone in 2022, the health system said. The local hospital, once known as Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Medical Center, will be Langone’s seventh hospital.
Dr. Marc Adler, senior vice president and chief of hospital operations at NYU Langone Hospital, at NYU Langone Hospital — Suffolk. Credit: NYU Langone Hospital/Joe Carrotta
“This hospital was one of the last free-standing hospitals in the region,” Dr. Marc Adler, senior vice president and chief of hospital operations at NYU Langone Hospital — Suffolk, said Friday. “To their credit they were able to provide services to the community. But with the affiliation and now with the merger, we’ve been able to bring the recipe for success from across the NYU system out here.”
To date, Langone has hired more than 100 physicians and other health care providers to work at the hospital; added robotic surgery offerings; reopened the Patchogue facility’s long-closed psychiatry unit; and upgraded the hospital’s electronic health record system, the health system said.
Langone has also expanded its ability to treat life-threatening injuries with a Provisional Level II Adult Trauma Center designation from the state, and is in the process of completing renovations on its emergency department, NYU Langone said.
Altogether, the health system said it has shortened patient stays by more than a day since 2022, reduced hospital infection rates by 25%, lowered emergency room wait times by 70%, and the number of operating room procedures have grown by over 50%.
In 2021, the Island hospital and NYU Langone said they had entered into an agreement to seek a merger of the two health care providers and would be seeking approval from the state Department of Health and the Federal Trade Commission by the end of that year.
The local hospital had previously been in merger talks with Stony Brook Medicine, though a deal was never reached.
In February 2022, NYU Langone received federal and state approval to become the parent of the Patchogue hospital. Officials with NYU Langone said at the time that a full merger of the two operations would take about three years.
Langone said in 2022 it planned to spend $100 million on upgrades to the local hospital, which is estimated to treat 400,000 patients a year. Officials with Langone said last week the health system has spent more than that amount in investments into the local facility, but did not provide updated dollar figures.
“This is great news for patients because it’s become an extremely challenging environment for any individual hospital to remain free standing,” said Wendy Darwell, president and CEO of the Suburban Hospital Alliance, a regional trade group representing hospitals on the Island and in the Hudson Valley.
“You have seen this trend not just in New York but across the country,” she said.
Darwell said larger health systems acquiring independent hospitals provide several benefits, including capital resources, negotiating power against health insurance companies, and the ability to provide greater access to health care services.
“You get resources coming into the community that might not have been there otherwise,” Darwell said.
Other health care experts said while consolidation of hospitals and systems can sometimes produce better results for the community, even nonprofits like NYU Langone have to contend with concerns over revenue generation.
“What we know about consolidation in general is there really is no evidence that it improves quality,” said Dr. Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, a Boston area-based think tank focused on health care reforms.
Saini said while nonprofit health systems may not be incentivized to the same extent as for-profit systems to raise profits and cutback on “less profitable” procedures, money considerations still drive decisions.
“Big systems can help these smaller systems but usually it’s a mixed bag,” Saini said.
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