CHS honored our funding commitment to SHF through August 31, 2021, the end of our fiscal year but made the decision to relinquish its sole membership in SHF.

CHS invested nearly $180 million in Santé Health Foundation over the years. We know that investment helped improve both clinical quality and access to care. Although our relationship with SHF must evolve, we are proud of what we were able to accomplish together.

Our aim now is to build on our success, for the decades ahead. We must do two things: (1) we must work with physicians to build an increasingly more integrated and efficient patient-care delivery system, with transparent governance. And (2) we must periodically reevaluate legal and regulatory requirements to make sure no compliance questions can arise.

One of the important lessons that COVID-19 taught us is that there are limits to the level of support we can legally provide Foundation members. For example, when we attempted to aid our physicians with the financial stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we encountered legal barriers that don’t exist in more integrated systems.

Absolutely not. This is about continued, sensible growth to meet patient demand and about continuing with our vision for seamless delivery of care. It is not our intent to try to control physician practices. Instead, we believe that a more direct relationship with our physician partners allows us to take the next step in growing the region’s most comprehensive, high-quality system of care. We are deeply committed to offering our physician partners more support, transparency and stability.