St. Joseph Adds Mission to Aid Its Own Health : Hospitals: Owner of facilities in Orange and Fullerton buys South County medical center as next step in regional expansion.

In the continuing consolidation of the health-care industry, St. Joseph Health System in Orange said Thursday that it has bought Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo.

St. Joseph Health System, which already owns St. Joseph Hospital in Orange and St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, said it will keep the Mission Viejo facility’s 1,300 employees in the deal, terms of which were not disclosed. The fate of senior executives at Mission Hospital was not clear.

“We’re trying to be in a position to develop regionally integrated health care delivery in Orange County,” said Tom Porath, vice president of corporate services for St. Joseph Health System.

Mission Hospital is the designated trauma center for South County and one of only three such centers countywide.

In an increasingly competitive health-care environment where hospitals in many cases are receiving lower reimbursements for patient care, such a deal is a survival tactic, said Trish Anderson, director of Medical Pathways Management Corp. in Torrance. Her company puts together such agreements for hospitals and physician groups.

“There are a lot of individual hospitals looking for a partner or two or three,” Anderson said.

Such agreements, for example, allow a group of hospitals to buy expensive equipment that they can share, Anderson said, so that patients at all affiliated hospitals have access to the treatment it provides. Hospitals can also save money by consolidating their billing, payroll, accounting and managed care contracting departments.

“Hospitals are affiliating so that they will not have to duplicate services and duplicate their infrastructure,” said Lori Aldrete, a spokeswoman for the California Assn. of Hospitals and Health Systems.

St. Joseph Health System is a nonprofit organization sponsored by the Roman Catholic Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange. It also owns a group of hospitals in Lubbock, Tex.

Mission Hospital, which will keep its name, is a 274-bed acute-care facility with an associated 53-bed pediatric center, Children’s Hospital at Mission. It was sold by the privately held Mission Viejo Medical Development Co.