CHARLOTTE, N.C.—After sharing plans in May to merge, Advocate Aurora Health and Atrium Health today announced they have closed on their formal combination to create Advocate Health. The combined organization will focus on delivering the best health outcomes and making care more accessible and affordable.
Advocate Health also is committed to being a force for meaningful social impact. The organization aims to bring medical innovations to patients more quickly, address the root causes of health inequities, advance population health, enable career advancement and achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.
The merger creates a combined footprint across Illinois, Wisconsin, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama serving nearly 6 million patients, with more than 1,000 sites of care and 67 hospitals, with combined revenues of more than $27 billion.
“Powered by 150,000 teammates — including the best and brightest physicians, nurses, researchers and faculty — we are poised to push past traditional geographic and care delivery boundaries to create a healthier tomorrow for all,” said Eugene A. Woods, chief executive officer of Advocate Health.
“We couldn’t be more pleased to bring our organizations together to do more, be better and go faster to help more people live well while training the next generation of health care professionals,” said Jim Skogsbergh, who will serve alongside Woods as chief executive officer until his retirement in 18 months.
Advocate Health is headquartered in Charlotte, while maintaining a strong presence in the Chicago and Milwaukee areas, including a planned, new, Milwaukee-based institute for health equity. The Advocate Health Care, Atrium Health and Aurora Health Care brands will continue to be used in their respective local communities, with Wake Forest University School of Medicine serving as the academic core of the combined entity.
The board of directors comprises an equal number of members from Advocate Aurora and Atrium Health. Thomas C. Nelson, chair of Atrium Health’s board of directors, will chair the new organization’s board until Dec. 31, 2023. Michele Richardson, chair of Advocate Aurora’s board of directors, will assume leadership for the immediately succeeding two-year term.
Advocate Health is the fifth-largest nonprofit integrated health system in the nation.
Data breach
In October, Advocate Aurora Health announced a data breach because of its use of Internet tracking technologies, such as Google and Meta (Facebook), meaning certain information belonging to up to 3 million patients using Advocate Aurora’s MyChart by EPIC or LiveWell app may have been exposed to outside organizations. BayCare Clinic notified patients in December that its partnership with Advocate Aurora Health means its patients using BayCare Clinic’s MyChart website and application is branded myBayCare also may have been exposed.
Advocate Aurora Health disabled and/or removed the tracking technologies from the shared software platform. The organization said the breach may have exposed information that includes the name of a patient’s medical provider; appointments or medical procedures; dates and locations of scheduled appointments; communications between you and others through myBayCare including patient name and medical ID number, and IP addresses.
No other personal identifying information — Social Security numbers, financial information or credit card numbers — were involved. The organizations are continuing to monitor our information security systems and make improvements and enhancements where appropriate.
Patients can protect themselves from online tracking by blocking or deleting cookies or using browsers that support privacy-protecting operations, such as incognito mode, and adjust privacy settings in Facebook and Google. The organizations have no evidence of misuse or incidents of fraud stemming from this incident.
Patients should regularly review their financial accounts and report any suspicious, unrecognized or inaccurate activity immediately. A free annual copy of your personal credit report from one or all the national consumer reporting companies can be obtained by visiting www.annualcreditreport.com, calling toll-free 877-322-8228, or completing the Annual Credit Report Request Form and mailing it to: Annual Credit Report Request Service, P.O. Box 105281, Atlanta, GA 30348-5281. You can print the form from http://www.ftc.gov/credit.
