Thursday, April 25, 2019
Emergency Care Partners (“ECP”), a leading regional provider of emergency medicine and outsourced emergency department management services to hospital facilities across Louisiana, New York, and Pennsylvania, today announced a strategic merger with Ascension Emergency Physicians (“AEP”). AEP is a Gonzales, Louisiana-based provider of outsourced emergency department management services to Our Lady of the Lake Ascension (f/k/a St. Elizabeth Hospital).
The combined emergency medicine platform will service departmental operations at 20 hospitals, supported by a combined clinical workforce of 201 physicians and 223 mid-level providers, treating in excess of 710,000 ER patient visits annually. AEP’s founding physicians, Dr. Chris Trevino and Dr. Jamie Broussard, will join as ECP shareholders and continue to serve in a leadership capacity at AEP.
Dr. Trevino commented, “We see this merger as a new and exciting opportunity to provide the highest quality of care to our community and to our health system. We look forward to partnering with the ECP team.”
In terms of strategy, the combined business will continue its service-intensive approach to managing small- and medium-sized emergency departments, leveraging ECP’s unique business model that combines local physician equity partnerships and its differentiated technology platform to ensure local service accountability and care quality at each ECP facility served. Further, ECP’s physicians, including legacy physician partners, will continue to serve as meaningful shareholders in the combined company.
ECP is backed by Varsity Healthcare Partners (“VHP”), a lower middle-market healthcare services private equity investment firm with expertise in growing care provider platforms, along with Regal Healthcare Capital Partners, a New York-based healthcare services growth equity and buyout firm.
Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP acted as legal adviser to ECP and VHP, while Offering Solutions PLLC acted as legal advisor to AEP.
