2 large hospital systems announce a new partnership in Colorado 22%
By John Ingold28%
7/21/2026, 7:04:59 PM
Keywords: Colorado, Health Care
BS Summary: This article contains 15 faulty reasoning types, including Availability Heuristic, Framing Effect, and Optimism Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 14.4% saturation with 85 hits. Analysis detected 603 faulty-reasoning hits from 590 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 35.6% and a BS Rank of 22% (17,126 of 21,886 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 78.20% of the article peer group.
Two giants of the Colorado healthcare market — hospital systems AdventHealth and Intermountain Health — announced Tuesday that they are coupling up.
The systems said they have signed a letter of intent to pursue a joint venture that would combine all five of AdventHealth’s Denver-area hospitals with three of Intermountain’s hospitals in the Denver metro area.
After the joint venture is formed, AdventHealth will take over management and day-to-day operations of Intermountain’s Good Samaritan Hospital in Lafayette, Lutheran Hospital in Wheat Ridge and Platte Valley Hospital in Brighton.
The affiliation also includes all of the hospitals’ associated physician practices and clinics, as well as AdventHealth’s freestanding emergency rooms and urgent cares.
“Partnering with Intermountain Health represents an opportunity to build on our shared commitment to deliver high-quality, compassionate care,” David Banks, the president and CEO of AdventHealth, said in a statement.
“We are excited about the prospect of a joint venture that would expand access to high-quality care and create a more connected experience for patients and care teams across the greater Denver area,” Intermountain President and CEO Rob Allen added, also in a statement.
It is unclear whether this joint venture will operate under a new name.
It is also unclear whether any money will exchange hands between the two systems and whether the partnership will lead to layoffs or consolidation of various administration, medical record or tech systems.
Spokespeople for AdventHealth and Intermountain Health declined to elaborate or make executives available for interviews.
A spokesperson for the Colorado Attorney General’s Office said the office expects to review the terms of the joint venture to make sure they comply with state law.
The partnership comes at a turbulent time in Colorado’s hospital market, as rising costs place hospitals under financial strain and changes to federal Medicaid and health insurance funding create even more worry.
Last year, Banner Health closed the emergency room at McKee Medical Center and converted McKee into a specialty hospital that provides fewer services.
Meanwhile, CommonSpirit Health is making changes at its three hospitals in Colorado Springs to adjust to market shifts.
Both AdventHealth and Intermountain have struggled in Colorado in recent years.
In the most recent edition of his every-other-year market analyses, independent analyst Allan Baumgarten found that AdventHealth’s Denver-area hospitals lost $68 million in 2024, while Intermountain’s lost $155 million.
Most of those losses for Intermountain came at Lutheran Medical Center, which moved to a new campus in 2024.
On top of those challenges, both systems are coming out of recent, high-profile breakups.
AdventHealth split with CommonSpirit Health in 2023 when their joint venture — which was called Centura Health — fractured.
Intermountain Health, meanwhile, was recently dumped by healthcare provider and insurer Kaiser Permanente, which took its contracts and considerable patient population to competing suitors, most notably HCA HealthONE.
AdventHealth, which is based in Florida, has more than 100,000 employees across more than 2,000 care sites nationwide.
Intermountain, based in Utah, is smaller with 4,600 employees at 34 hospitals and more than 400 clinics.
Intermountain only came to Colorado in 2022, when it merged with SCL Health, taking over the five Colorado hospitals that SCL managed.
SCL Health was a Catholic-affiliated system, meaning its hospitals followed Catholic health directives.
Of those hospitals, though, only Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver and St.
Mary’s Medical Center in Grand Junction continue to follow the Catholic directives, according to Intermountain.
Those two hospitals are not included in the joint venture with AdventHealth, though it is unclear why.
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