St. Mary’s Health and MaineHealth expand clinical services partnership

Courtesy / St. Mary’s Health System St. Mary’s Health System, headquartered in Lewiston, said the expansion of its clinical affiliation with MaineHealth will help make care more accessible locally.

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By Staff

St. Mary’s Health System and MaineHealth on Wednesday announced the expansion of their longstanding clinical affiliation to provide an enhanced array of specialty care services in the Lewiston-Auburn community.

Expanded services, beginning with general surgery, cardiology and cancer care, will be provided by MaineHealth specialists on St. Mary’s campus in Lewiston, according to officials there. The campus, near Bates College, includes St. Mary's Regional Medical Center, a 233-bed acute care facility.

The announcement follows months of discussion and planning between the two organizations.

“We have worked with MaineHealth to assess our community’s current and future needs,” Steven Jorgensen, president of St. Mary’s Health System, said in a news release. “We believe the expanded specialty services we are now able to offer will help us improve the health of our community by making care more accessible locally. It will also strengthen our recruiting efforts and make our community more attractive to businesses that may be looking to expand or relocate here.”

Andrew Mueller, CEO of Maine Health, said, “By bringing new specialists and services from MaineHealth to the Lewiston-Auburn community, we can ease the burden on patients who would otherwise have to travel outside the community for certain specialty care and services."

Through the expanded clinical affiliation, residents of Lewiston-Auburn will be able to access the care they need without having to leave the health system or community, the health system said.

“Our community faces some critical health challenges that we are working to address through our expanded affiliation and long-term investments in community health,” said Jorgensen. “In addition to increased poverty and uninsured rates, we see a higher prevalence of some serious health conditions in Androscoggin County, including cardiac and pulmonary health issues caused by numerous preventable and unpreventable factors.”

The agreement comes at a time when Androscoggin County has been designated by the Maine Center for Disease Control as an area of high COVID-19 transmission.

St. Mary's Health System is a member of Covenant Health, a Massachusetts-based, Catholic health care system.

MaineHealth is Maine's largest health care system, and includes 12 hospitals and over 22,000 employees.