On Christmas Eve in 2023, Rick Albright called an ambulance for his wife, Rose Anne, who was in great pain. That ambulance took her to Mercy Medical Center in Aurora, which is only a four-minute drive away from the Albrights’ home.
It was a hospital the two had been to before — he had previously been hospitalized there after a stroke, and his wife had surgery done there, Rick Albright told The Beacon-News. He said the two had long been cared for by doctors with Advocate Health Care, a non-profit medical group with a large presence in Aurora, and when they previously went to Mercy Medical Center, Advocate doctors were there to see them.
But when the two arrived at Mercy Medical Center’s emergency room on Christmas Eve in 2023 and learned she had a gastric issue, they were told that her Advocate gastroenterologist, the same one who had previously operated on her at that same hospital, would not be able to see her, according to Rick Albright.
He said it was the first time he’d heard that Advocate doctors may not be able to see them at Mercy Medical Center.
While the on-call doctor did a great job, eventually doing surgery to remove some gallstones, it was “completely luck of the draw,” he said.
These types of stories could become more common now that Advocate has pulled its doctors out of Mercy Medical Center without broadly informing its patients of the change. Around a half-dozen people who currently work or recently stopped working at Mercy confirmed to The Beacon-News that Advocate doctors were being pulled from Mercy Medical Center.
In a statement sent to The Beacon-News, Advocate said that it is “shifting all hospital-based services to Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove and surrounding hospitals,” which is being done to “provide the best and highest quality care for our patients where they need it most” and “help us continue to coordinate and integrate care for our patients who need hospital-based services.”
Most of the care Advocate provides to its patients takes place at its clinics, the locations of which are not changing, according to the statement from Advocate.
When an Advocate spokesperson was asked when and how patients are being notified of this change, they said it is being done “as part of the scheduling process.”
Prime Healthcare, which recently bought Mercy Medical Center along with a number of other hospitals from Ascension, also confirmed that Advocate Heath has decided to “prohibit their physicians from continuing to provide care at our hospital.” However, there is currently “no impact to the hospital’s emergency care and no impact to patient care or access,” a Mercy spokesperson recently told The Beacon-News.
Prime Healthcare asked Advocate to reconsider its decision, but “our efforts were declined,” the spokesperson said.
Eight Advocate cardiologists, the last Advocate physicians at the hospital, were officially pulled out of Mercy Medical Center on April 5, according to the Mercy spokesperson.
Advocate previously offered other types of care at Mercy — including ENT, pulmonology, urology, and hospitalist care — but those doctors were pulled out ahead of Prime’s purchase of the hospital, the Mercy spokesperson said.
Jennifer Vitale, a certified registered nurse anesthetist who has been working at Mercy Medical Center for about 15 years, said that Advocate general surgeons and gastroenterologists were among the first to go. Both have been gone for over a year, she said.
Other Advocate Health Care doctors were pulled out late last year or the start of this year, including orthopedics; ear, nose and throat doctors; pulmonology; urology; critical care doctors; podiatry and hospitalists, according to Richa Sharma, a doctor who up until Feb. 14 worked in Mercy Medical Center’s intensive care unit and was the hospital’s chair of internal medicine.
Sharma and Vitale, neither of whom work for Advocate Health, were among those who agreed to come forward publicly to confirm Advocate was pulling its doctors out of Mercy Medical Center.
Sharma said that Advocate hospitalists used to make up between 30% and 50% of all the hospitalists working at Mercy Medical Center. Hospitalists act as general doctors and coordinate care among other physicians for patients in the hospital.
Most of Mercy Medical Center’s surgical care also used to come from Advocate Health Care, according to Vitale. While she has seen a lot of changes in administration at Mercy over the years, she has never seen anything like this, she said.
When asked to confirm which types of Advocate doctors no longer work at Mercy Medical Center, an Advocate spokesperson referred to the company’s statement on the situation.
Some specialist departments at Mercy Medical Center were hit harder by Advocate’s pull-out than others. Sharma told The Beacon-News late last year that the group she works for — Sound Physicians — was contracted to provide 50% of critical care at Mercy, while the other half came from Advocate Health Care.
Prime Healthcare decided to go with a different group for critical care services, which is why Sharma no longer works at Mercy, she told The Beacon-News last month.
Mercy Medical Center’s pulmonology, orthopedic surgery and ear, nose and throat departments used to also be staffed primarily by Advocate doctors, according to Sharma. But, she said late last year that there was another group already providing podiatry services at Mercy, and they were going to continue, so “that wouldn’t be a huge gap.”
The bottom line, Sharma said at the time, was that Advocate pulling out of Mercy Medical Center was an additional layer of instability on top of the instability caused by Prime’s purchase of the hospital.
While Prime now says it has closed any gaps left by Advocate pulling out its doctors, Sharma said in January that the hospital was having to make deals with other local hospitals to take patients because of gaps in coverage.
“All the anticipated effects are playing out currently,” Sharma said in January about Advocate pulling its doctors out of Mercy Medical Center.
At the time, deals were still being worked out with groups to cover orthopedics and urology, there was no pulmonology coverage and there were questions around ear, nose and throat coverage, she said in January.
Rick Albright called the situation “silly” when he spoke to The Beacon-News.
“We’re the second biggest city in Illinois, and Advocate, who I’ve been involved with since they were Dreyer, they’re trying to send us all over the place for our procedures,” he said.
If Rose Anne Albright had wanted to see her own Advocate doctor that Christmas Eve after being examined while in great pain at Mercy Medical Center, the same hospital where her Advocate doctor previously handled her surgery, she would have needed to take another ambulance to Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove, which “makes no sense at all and is extremely expensive,” Rick Albright said.
While those with Advocate doctors are still able to come get procedures done at Mercy, it would be out of network for them, Sharma told The Beacon-News. She said that means procedures may be more costly and harder to get approved.
Mercy Medical Center provides care to an “underserved community,” and many local residents are no longer going to have access to hospital care within their own community if they are patients of Advocate Health Care and do not have the means to travel beyond the city, according to Vitale.
Another concern of Vitale’s is that, as Mercy Medical Center loses doctors, quality staff may also be lost. She also wonders if Mercy will be able to maintain the same standard of care that the hospital has provided over the years.
She loves the hospital, she said, and thinks it is a unique place that has maintained a community and family feel.
“It’s strategically in a great location. It’s in the middle of a large community of people,” Vitale said about Mercy Medical Center. “I feel like this community needs that resource.”
Advocate Health Care has similarly pulled doctors out of Rush Copley Medical Center, the other hospital in Aurora, but that process has been more gradual than what happened at Mercy, Rush Copley’s President and CEO John Diederich told The Beacon-News.
In the 1990s, Advocate doctors used to make up around 50% of Rush Copley’s patient care revenue, but that has been dropping since then, falling to around 35% in the 2000s and to around 25% in the 2010s, according to Diederich. He said a more “dramatic” pull-out happened in 2022, when Advocate did not renew the lease on a large space on Rush Copley’s campus that it held for 13 years then started pulling its doctors from the hospital.
Between mid-2022 and early 2023, 90% of Advocate specialists resigned from Rush Copley’s medical staff, Diederich said. That included Advocate ophthalmologists, pulmonologists, orthopedic surgeons, general surgeons, GI doctors and OB-GYNs, he said.
Some Advocate doctors remain, including cardiologists, nephrologists and hospitalists, but they only make up around 5% of the hospital’s patient care revenue at this point, Diederich said in February.
While Advocate Health Care’s pullout of Rush Copley was a hit to the hospital’s revenues, which Diederich called a “short-term bump,” Rush Copley has been able to recover, both filling in the gaps that Advocate left behind with its own medical group and expanding that medical group to keep up with the community’s growth, he said.
“I think Advocate’s short-term strategy was our long-term opportunity,” Diederich said.
Mercy Medical Center’s spokesperson said that, despite Advocate pulling its doctors out, the hospital has no gaps in care or coverage and remains “deeply committed to our mission of providing compassionate, accessible and community-based care.”
“Prime Healthcare has successfully transitioned services in the past, and we will continue to do so with the same level of diligence and dedication,” the spokesperson said. “Our patients deserve nothing less.”
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
