The Chronicle’s Todd Ackerman, who has done a fine job over the past couple of years of covering the divisive split between former Texas Medical Center partners, Baylor College of Medicine and the Methodist Hospital — reports today that Baylor and Methodist have entered into a settlement brokered by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and that Baylor and its new teaching hospital — St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital — have decided to shelve their ongoing merger negotiations for the time being.
Whew! Never a dull moment in the Medical Center, eh?

Mr. Ackerman reports that the Baylor-Methodist truce is centered around a new collaborative $16 million program between the institutions to improve immunization and emergency room programs for Houston’s underprivileged:

“I have great respect for these institutions and am grateful we were all able to sit at the table to transform some serious differences into a cooperative environment of good will,” said Abbott. “The ultimate goal is to ensure the highest level of care to the community, as well as to the neediest among us, especially the children of Houston.”
The agreement also calls for Baylor and Methodist to renew a spirit of collaboration by agreeing to share teaching, research and clinical programs and to limit the recruitment of staff from one institution to another.
During the negotiations, chaired by former Harris County Commissioner and current Texas Medical Center board member Elizabeth Ghrist and attended by three members from both insitutions’ boards, Abbott barred negative communication and recruiting of staff by either institution. He extended the negotiations, originally scheduled to finish at the end of August, through September, when he promised to make a pronouncement.
Friday, Abbott made that pronouncement. Joined by top officials of Baylor, Methodist and the Texas Medical Center, he said the new agreement ends the protracted dispute and marks “a new era.”
The agreement between the institutions calls for 90 to 130 Baylor residents to rotate through Methodist for at least the next five years; for the two to share urology; ear, nose and throat; cardiovascular disease prevention; and cell and gene therapy programs; and for scientists at Baylor and at Methodist’s new research institute to collaborate.
It calls for both institutions to attract new doctors and scientists to the Texas Medical Center rather than recruit from each other.

Given the raid on Baylor’s faculty that Methodist engineered over the past year, it remains to be seen whether that last provision of the settlement holds up. However, Mr. Abbott’s involvement in brokering the settlement certainly adds an element of governmental action that did not exist before in the various dust-ups that have taken place between the two institutions in their messy divorce.
Meanwhile, Mr. Ackerman reports that the Baylor-St. Luke’s merger negotiations have been shelved on a friendly basis as the new partners assess their new medical school-teaching hospital relationship. That such negotiations have been put on hold is not particularly surprising given that such a merger would be highly unusual in the world of academic medicine between even longtime partners, much less ones that have been together for a less than a year. My sense is that the negotiations may revive as the parties get more comfortable with their relationship and evaluate how a merger could facilitate both parties’ goals in the ever-shifting sands of financing and providing health care in the U.S.