Olathe Health officially part of University of Kansas system. What’s next for patients?

The University of Kansas and Olathe Health have finalized an agreement to join forces and become one health system, a move first announced in October. Next step: Figure out how to make it happen.

“Welcome to the family. It is a phenomenal day,” Bob Page, CEO and president of the KU health system, said at a press briefing Thursday in Olathe.

Olathe Health in Johnson County has been an independent health care system for 70 years. Now its 2,400 employees, 350 health care providers and 250 volunteers are part of KU.

The Olathe system has two hospitals — Olathe Medical Center with 250 staff beds and Miami County Medical Center in Paola with 39 beds.

For now, nothing changes for patients in Olathe, hospital officials said. They’ve been in Olathe this week meeting with employees and answering questions about how all this will work — what the move means for patients and employees, when new signage will go up.

“Nothing is going to change substantially right now,” said Tammy Peterman, president of the KU system’s Kansas City division.

Teams from both health systems will begin meeting as early as next week to work on integrating the two staffs while providing “seamless care” to patients, Peterman said.

She said they want to finish that integration plan in the first quarter of 2023, a “pretty aggressive timeline.”

“Once we do that, we will identify some of the priorities we’ll be working on together,” she said.

She said two initial priorities will be the development of a new ambulatory surgery center at 151st Street and Quivira Road, a project Olathe Health began last year, and bringing KU’s cancer program to Olathe.

New signage is coming, too, but “we don’t know what that will look like exactly,” Peterman said. “We know we’ll have the University of Kansas system name on the health buildings.

“We don’t have that yet, but stay tuned because we will.”

The two health systems began discussing this move in 2019, a response to a changing health care landscape — decreasing insurance reimbursements, increasing cost of care, growing challenges of recruiting providers and staff — in which patients want routine and complex health care within one health system.

KU officials have described Olathe as a strong primary care physician network with multiple hospital and clinic locations and land for expansion in Johnson County.

Concerns about the integration are “valid,” said Jason Hannagan, Olathe Health’s interim CEO. “We’re going to take as long as necessary to make sure it’s right for everybody,” with patients the top priority.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Hannagan said.

He temporarily replaces former CEO Stan Holm, who shepherded the first phase of bringing the two systems together. Hannagan said Holm and KU have “mutually agreed to part ways.”

The health systems have set up a website to keep the public updated: KansasHealthTogether.com.