Neshoba General Hospital ends partnership with Anderson

Neshoba General Hospital is ending its nearly five-year affiliation with Anderson Regional Medical Center. The CEO of Neshoba General says it was always a loose arrangement.

"Anderson had really no control of operational governance, no management structure or anything like that in effect with our organization," says Lee McCall, CEO of Neshoba General. "We always remained independent."

The reason the two teamed up to begin with was to better coordinate care and improve services in the community, which McCall says was the case early on.

"In over the past two to three years it's been limited and infrequent communication between Anderson and us," says McCall. "Both of us have kind of gone in our own direction."

McCall says the termination has nothing to do with Neshoba General's recent growth of a medical office pavilion and outpatient therapy center. Neshoba General and Anderson will continue to work together to provide healthcare to the community on a referral basis.

"As we have the need for sending our patients to higher levels of care, we will still lean on all those providers in our community, in our region," says McCall. "I think it's to everyone's benefit to work together and we will continue to work strongly with Anderson."

McCall says patient care will not be affected.

"There wasn't any services that Anderson was providing here locally and those go away. That's not the case," says McCall. "As far as the Neshoba that everyone knows today and how it operates it will continue ,but I will say it will continue to grow stronger."

The effective termination date will be March 28, 2017.