DAPHNE, Alabama – Mercy Medical announced the pending sale of a large portion of its physical facilities in Baldwin County this morning to SE Healthcare, Inc. of Florida. Jake Bell, CEO and president, said the sale comes after a three-year examination into the future of Mercy Medical, which opened its main bayside campus as a convalescent home in 1949 and later pioneered hospice and home health care in South Alabama.

“The conclusion that we reached was that there was a great need for the expansion of home and community-based services, much more than institutional services,” Bell said. “We began a very detailed process of looking at the various ministries and as we went through each service line we realized that if we were going to focus on home and community-based services we needed to find organizations that could help us with the institutional services including the Daphne main campus.”

Bell said a concerted effort was made to partner with a series of local health care providers, but after being unable to reach a mutually-beneficial agreement, Mercy Medical approached SE Healthcare.

“[SE Healthcare] will continue to provide this service here in Daphne.” Bell said, adding that he expected that as many as 95 percent of Mercy Medical’s 470 employees would retain their jobs after the transition.

The sale of the campus, which includes a 25-bed skilled nursery and rehabilitation hospital, is expected to finalize Dec. 1. Other Mercy Medical properties, including The Hamlet and Carroll Place in Fairhope and Catherine Place and the John McClure Snook Care Center in Daphne were also being brokered, Bell said.

Mercy Medical will continue to provide its home health care services as well as the Guardian Angel program and Operation Lifesaver. Bell said the board of trustees is positioning the organization to become the first provider in the state to administer the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE), which they anticipate will more than double the number of patients they serve over the next five years.

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, PACE, which is administered in 31 other states, provides all-inclusive heath care for frail, elderly Medicare and Medicaid patients in an adult day health center that is supplemented by in-home and referral services in accordance with participants' needs. PACE providers are paid a lump sum for each patient, so it is in their best interest to promote preventative health care.

Mercy Medical will continue to maintain administrative offices and home and hospice headquarters in Baldwin County and in the next 2-3 years will be developing a PACE site. In addition to Mobile and Baldwin counties, Bell said that expansion would include Eastern Jefferson County in the next 12-15 months, where the Sisters of Mercy already have an educational presence.

Sr. Deborah Kennedy, vice president of mission integration, said she viewed the sale as the next step in the continuing mission of the Sisters of Mercy to provide for the underserved.

“Certainly the Sisters of Mercy are still very much involved in this mission as it goes forward. We will try to the best of our ability to make it known that we are still here and still involved in health care ministry and we are trying to be responsible with the new direction that health care is going today,” Kennedy said.