The OCH Regional Medical Center’s Board of Trustees held the last of three meetings Thursday to evaluate proposals from three health care systems vying for an affiliation with the hospital.
Linda Breazeale, the chair of the OCH board, said she expects to meet with the Oktibbeha County Board of Supervisors to report on the meetings, with a decision on which group OCH will affiliate to come soon after.
Memphis-based Baptist Memorial Health Services, North Mississippi Health Services of Tupelo and the Jackson-based University of Mississippi Medical Center all have made proposals.
“We have had really good discussions,” Breazeale said of the 2-1/2 hour meeting. “We reviewed the follow-up questions we had distributed to the three health systems and discussed the pros and cons for how each one would work with OCH in the future.
“The next stop now is to meet with the board of supervisors and share with them what we’ve learned,” she added. “I think that will probably happen in early June and we should probably be able to announce the affiliation pretty soon after that. I think we’re pretty close to the end of the process now.”
Breazeale said she has been pleased with the discussions.
“It’s been very thorough,” she said. “We have dug very deeply to find out as much as we could find out about what each system has to offer us and what they want from us in return.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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