Corewell to outsource more ER staffing to TeamHealth: report
- Corewell reportedly plans to outsource three more Detroit-area ERs to TeamHealth.
- The hospitals are Troy, Grosse Pointe and Lenox, with Livonia likely.
- TeamHealth already staffs Corewell ERs in Dearborn, Trenton, Taylor and Wayne.
- Troy’s emergency department logs more than 106,000 visits a year.
MICHIGAN, UNITED STATES — Corewell Health is reportedly preparing to hand emergency department staffing at its Troy, Grosse Pointe and Lenox hospitals to TeamHealth, a private equity-backed physician staffing company. The move would extend an arrangement TeamHealth already runs at four other Corewell emergency rooms in the Detroit area.
What the internal notice says
Corewell disclosed the plan internally, and the Livonia hospital is likely to follow, according to a Deadline Detroit column by Eric Starkman, who reviewed a copy of the announcement.
Corewell’s spokesman was out of the office when Starkman asked for comment, and the column is the only public report of the plan so far.
TeamHealth already manages Corewell’s emergency rooms in Dearborn, Trenton, Taylor and Wayne. That arrangement predates Spectrum Health’s takeover of Beaumont Health and the rebranding of the combined network as Corewell.
Troy’s emergency department is the second busiest in Michigan, with more than 106,000 visits a year. Corewell’s Royal Oak emergency room, the busiest in the state and a teaching hospital, is not part of the plan.
Cost and data concerns
Starkman argued that outsourcing moves payroll, benefits and physician liability insurance off the health system’s books in one of a hospital’s most expensive departments. He also wrote that routing emergency records and billing through a contractor’s own systems adds third-party data security risk.
“I haven’t talked to any doctor in my department that’s happy about this,” one Troy emergency physician told Starkman, who wrote that morale was already poor before staff were notified.
The column also noted that Corewell and its legacy systems have faced past data breaches tied to outside vendors, including one that exposed the information of roughly one million Michigan patients.
Emergency workers at Ascension St. John Hospital in Detroit walked off the job two years ago to protest conditions in an emergency room TeamHealth managed, and Ascension later ended the relationship, Starkman wrote.
The hospital has since been taken over by Henry Ford Health.
TeamHealth has pointed to faster care in departments it runs. It told Click on Detroit that median door-to-doctor time at Ascension St. John’s emergency room in Detroit fell to 15 minutes in 2024 from 25 minutes in 2023.
For health systems, the plan shows emergency medicine joining the clinical services that are bought in rather than staffed directly. When records and billing move to a staffing partner, healthcare outsourcing contracts need clear terms on data security and on how revenue cycle management (RCM) runs between the two organizations.
Providers comparing partners can review the top U.S. healthcare outsourcing companies.
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Disclosure: Outsource Accelerator uses AI tools in the backend of its editorial workflow. Every article is reviewed and verified by a human editor before publication.
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