Penn Medicine is taking over Crozer’s Broomall and Glen Mills offices for $5M; OB/GYN services leaving Crozer-Chester Medical Center

Editor’s note: Since the publication of this article, Main Line Health has said it working on a plan to take on the OB/GYN services currently provided at Crozer Health.

The University of Pennsylvania Health System has agreed to take over the leases at Crozer Health’s medical offices in Broomall and Glen Mills in a $5 million deal that will forestall the closure of Crozer’s hospitals for at least a week, a lawyer for Crozer’s bankrupt owner, Prospect Medical Holdings, told a judge Thursday.

The maternity care provided through labor and delivery services at Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland will be transitioned to an unnamed provider.

Neither plan is final. And at most, the money buys stakeholders another 10 days to keep trying to find a long-term solution that would keep open Crozer Health, which also operates Taylor Hospital in Ridley Park.

In addition to Penn’s contribution, Delaware County agreed to pay $1 million in advance for behavioral health services, the lawyer, Bill Curtin, said.

The $6 million total fell short of the $9 million Prospect had demanded by Wednesday at 4 p.m. to prevent the closure.

Curtin provided no update on sale negotiations, but said Prospect would start implementing a restructuring plan developed by FTI Consulting Inc., the outside manager that has been in place at Crozer since February.

“Certain of the service lines that exist at Crozier are not financially viable at Crozer, but would be financially viable with other providers,” Curtin said.

The first step in that restructuring is the transition of labor and delivery services from Crozer-Chester, he said. That was expected to happen after a sale, as well as other undisclosed reductions in services.

Expediting them will “make any future closure much less dramatic for the system and for everyone involved,” Curtin said.

Curtin said that geographic proximity to the patients who count on Crozer is being considered in the transition plans. Main Line Health has the closest hospitals with labor and delivery, and it has available capacity in that unit at Riddle Hospital near Media.

» READ MORE: Crozer patients in limbo as Delco health system’s future remains uncertain

California-based Prospect did not respond to a question about where those services are going. Main Line declined to comment.

Employees are not being forgotten in this process, Melissa L. Van Eck, a lawyer in the state Attorney General’s Office, told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Stacey Jernigan. “What’s going to happen is that employees may be wearing different jerseys, but they’ll still continue doing their job,” she said.

However, employees are faced with tremendous uncertainty as to whether they will be among those who move to a new employer or are left behind and lose their jobs if what remains of Crozer closes.

The deal with Penn still needed to be finalized, Curtin said. The $5 million will be structured mostly as a donation, but some of the money will be for furniture, fixtures, and equipment, he said.

Penn did not say whether it plans to employ the doctors who work in Broomall and Glen Mills. The effort to transfer the leases at the facilities is in the early stages, but “we plan to ensure continued operations in these facilities, and over time, offer reimagined, expanded services to improve the health of local residents,” Penn said in a statement.

Those two outpatient facilities were considered attractive assets in any sale, compared to Crozer-Chester, which gets a large proportion of its revenue from Medicaid, a government-funded insurance plan for low-income people that doesn’t pay as well as private insurance.

No date was set for a follow-up hearing on the future of Crozer. Work on a sale is expected to continue, officials said.