Mercy health system is joining with three collaborating organizations to undertake a 30-year, $700 million effort to expand care access and quality in Northwest Arkansas.
Plans call for a new cardiovascular center of excellence, an outpatient specialty care center, and funds for the hiring, training and retention of physicians. Mercy has seven hospitals in Arkansas, most of them in the western and northwestern part of the state.
Mercy’s collaborators are the Alice L. Walton Foundation, the Heartland Whole Health Institute and Cleveland Clinic. Mercy and the foundation each are contributing $350 million to the initiative.
Top goals of the effort are to reduce care costs and improve access and outcomes.
According to a press release on the work, research has shown that many patients go outside of the Northwest Arkansas region when they need cardiology and other specialty services. A 2019 study conducted for the Northwest Arkansas Council found that the region misses out on an estimated $950 million because of this. The organizations hope their efforts will help “make Northwest Arkansas a destination for care and a national example of how to provide health care in new and innovative ways,” says the release.
A focus will be on bringing more value-based care to Northwest Arkansas.
Mercy’s funding will go primarily toward the cardiology center of excellence, which will be on its Mercy Hospital Northwest Arkansas campus in Rogers. Mercy and Cleveland Clinic will co-brand their cardiology services in Northwest Arkansas. Mercy’s funding also will go toward recruiting potentially hundreds of new physicians to the region. The foundation’s funding primarily will go toward an outpatient specialty care center, which will have cardiac services. That center will be in Bentonville at a to-be-announced location. Specifics on the timing of the centers’ construction have yet to be released.
Cleveland Clinic, a standout in cardiology and heart and vascular surgery, will be providing on-site expertise at the centers. Heartland Whole Health Institute, which was founded by Alice Walton, will help ensure that whole health principles underlie all the work. Walton is the daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton.
The four-way collaboration builds upon previous relationships between the Alice L. Walton Foundation and Cleveland Clinic to bolster specialty care access in Northwest Arkansas, a region that has a growing population. The collaborators say the effort in cardiology lays the groundwork for even more joint efforts in other specialties within the region in the future.