Rich Leichwig

to ultimately serve our most important customer, and that's, you know, our patients and the communities within which we operate.

In our case, we...

decided, both St.

Luke's and BJC, that we wanted to come together.

We both were operating two very successful healthcare systems, and we were anticipating what the future might look like if we weren't able to achieve scale.

But there was not a real burning platform

And so one of the challenges we had was, one, how do we convince our constituents that this was the right time to take this very bold move?

In some ways, it may have been easier if either one of us were obviously not performing as well.

And therefore, we had to make sure that we were really conveying what was going to be the enhanced value that we were going to bring to the community, to all of our stakeholders, whether that was our physician partners, our staff, our boards, the regulatory bodies that were going to be scrutinizing this.

So we made sure that we communicated some of the key attributes.

We also made sure that we focused on doing no harm.

Again, two successful organizations, one of the risks could be that we could get distracted or focused on something that ultimately was going to detract from the success that we had independent.

We wanted to make sure one plus one equals three, not that one plus one equals one and a half.

And so we kept that sort of that mantra, do no harm, particularly when it came to delivering patient care in front of us.

And then we also were very clear in what we thought the path forward needed to look like.

We operate almost 250 miles apart.

And so we wanted to make sure that both teams knew that we really weren't going to integrate our clinical programs, certainly in the early years.

The opportunity for integration was going to come more around our shared services.

Drew, the other thing I would add in terms of what we're concerned about and what others should be thinking about, culture is critically important.

We had worked with each other for 10 plus years and our cultures were fairly similar as we've now gotten to know each other even better.