READING, PA \u2013 The Berks Community Health Center is looking to merge with another regional healthcare provider.<\/p>\n
The center announced it has entered an agreement to merge with Union Community Care, a Lancaster County-based group with offices in Lebanon and Chester counties.<\/p>\n
“Community health centers are trying to respond to the growing demand for affordable, high-quality care,” said Union Community Care CEO Alisa Jones.<\/p>\n
Jones says the changing healthcare environment led BCHC to propose the idea of merging.<\/p>\n
“These conditions are creating new opportunities for mission-aligned organizations to work together to share knowledge and to strengthen community health for the future,” Jones said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jones says the proposed merger will benefit both organizations, giving them the ability to share practices and resources to give their patients the best care possible.<\/p>\n
“We’re neighbors, so by doing things together, we can accomplish more than either of us can do alone,” said Jones.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Despite the potential internal changes, Jones says not much will change for their patients.<\/p>\n
“What won’t change is the name. What won’t change is the great high-quality care at the current locations that Berks has in the city of Reading,” said Jones.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jones says the merger still needs to be approved at the state and federal levels.<\/p>\n
“When we think about the future of community health, when we think about the thousands of people in the county of Berks that need affordable, high-quality healthcare access, we have to continue to strive to do more,” Jones said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
All three BCHC locations will stay open, extending Union Community Care’s reach into a fourth county.<\/p>\n
“What we hope is that patients actually are able to get more access once we are just one organization under the same umbrella,” Jones said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"READING, PA \u2013 The Berks Community Health Center is looking to merge with another regional healthcare provider. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267303,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[57999,1557,3831,3685,2467,6113,36872,736,128,130,129,112740,112739],"class_list":["post-267302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-berks-community-health-center","tag-chester-county","tag-health-care","tag-lancaster-county","tag-lebanon-county","tag-merger","tag-patients","tag-reading","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news","tag-regulators","tag-union-community-care"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267302\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}