Current GVL, CHS leadership to remain in place at St. Francis despite merger

Jul 27, 2018 09:50AM ● By Chris Haire

Craig McCoy, CEO of Bon Secours St. Francis Health System in Greenville

Local leadership at Bon Secours St. Francis in Greenville and Roper St. Francis in Charleston will remain the same when the Bon Secours Health System and Mercy Health merge later this fall.

In Greenville, Craig McCoy will continue to serve as CEO of the Bon Secours St. Francis Health System, and Lorraine L. Lutton will remain president and CEO of the Roper St. Francis Health System.

Earlier this week, the companies announced their new name -- Bon Secours Mercy Health -- and a new CEO, current Mercy Health president and CEO, John M. Starcher, Jr.

Starcher, Jr., will lead a combined health system of nearly 60,000 employees, 43 hospitals, and 1,000 care sites and serve an estimated 10 million patients a year.

After 13 years as president and CEO of Bon Secours Health System, Rich Statuto will retire in 2019.

Lutton spent 24 years with BayCare Health System in central Florida, eventually rising to president of the system’s St. Joseph Hospital in Tampa, before taking the helm as the first female CEO of the 150-year-old not-for-profit health care system in Charleston.

Before McCoy's administrative career began, he served as a Greenville County paramedic. He says that seven-year stint as a paramedic taught him a lot about life. After graduating from Furman, he says he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, so he went to paramedic school and started working for Greenville County. He says the experience exposed him to impoverished areas of the community that he didn’t know existed.

“I think the biggest thing it taught me was the importance of consistently being yourself regardless of where you are or who are interacting with, across all socio-economic scales,” McCoy recalls. “A lot of human needs are the same. I learned to be yourself and to do what you can to help other people.”

The size of Bon Secours Mercy Health is nothing compared to the giants in the industry.

Presently, Nashville-based HCA Healthcare has 178 hospitals, 120 outpatient surgery centers, and 46,745 beds, and it’s looking to add six more when it buys Asheville’s Mission Health.

Meanwhile, the next biggest system, Franklin, Tenn.-based Community Health System, has 126 hospitals in 20 states.

The merger of of Mercy Health and Bon Secours isn't the only new partnership that will impact the Upstate.

The Greenville Health System and Palmetto Health have partnered to form the S.C. Health Company, a new health system that will be able to serve 1.2 million patients a year and will have 28,000 employees, with approximately 14,000 coming from both GHS and Palmetto Health.

Together, the two systems will comprise 13 hospitals and scores of other practices and facilities, and according to S.C. Health, some 2.5 million South Carolinians will be within 15 minutes of a physician’s practice underneath the health system’s umbrella, making it the single largest private employer in the Palmetto State.

One unique feature of S.C. Health: the new company will be headquartered in two different cities, Greenville and Columbia, with the former head of GHS, Michael C. Riordan, and the previous leader of Palmetto Health, Charles D. Beaman Jr., taking the green-scrub reins of the combined system.

John McCurry and Holly Fisher contributed to this report.

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