UVA Health and Riverside Health have spent the past three years building a partnership that blends academic medicine with community-based care.
The partnership will expand UVA Health’s reach beyond Charlottesville with 5% ownership in Riverside. In turn, UVA will bring doctors and advanced treatments into eastern Virginia, with a focus on heart surgery, transplant services, clinical research and physician training.
“They are very good at highly complex, highly specialized procedures, highly specialized medicine. As a community hospital, we have to be prepared to take whatever walks in the door,” said Jason Kilgore, a senior vice president at Riverside Health. “We want to have that ability for patients not to have to leave their hometown to go get that next level of care.”
Riverside is UVA Health’s sole hospital partner in the region. Over the past three years, the alignment has translated into several new programs.
In cardiac care, a new cardiac surgeon affiliated with UVA Health now works full time at Riverside Regional Medical Center in Newport News.
UVA physicians have also worked alongside Riverside teams to evaluate equipment and expand the hospital’s ability to handle more complex cases, including structural heart procedures like transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR, a minimally invasive procedure to treat aortic stenosis.
Jason Lineen, chief strategy officer at UVA Health, said the partnership has opened the door for patients in Hampton Roads to access “cutting-edge research” tied to those procedures, including new device trials that would typically be limited to academic medical centers.
The partnership also extends into transplant services. UVA Health has the state’s sole comprehensive transplant center, and the partnership allows transplant physicians to travel regularly to Riverside to see patients in clinics, Lineen said.
“They can get their pre- and post-transplant care close to home, and only travel for the surgery itself,” he said.
The collaboration also includes a joint internal medicine residency program in Newport News with 13 slots per class. Lineen said the program is aimed at addressing the nationwide physician shortages, particularly in primary care, by training doctors locally and encouraging them to stay in the region.
Kilgore said the partnership is not a merger, and neither Riverside nor UVA Health plans to consolidate in the future.
