A perfect match: Doylestown Health joins Penn Medicine

Blue and red confetti flew through the chilly air as the crowd cheered and celebrated Doylestown Health’s integration with Penn Medicine. In this moment more than a year in the making, attendees waved navy blue rally towels emblazoned with “Doylestown Health / Penn Medicine / It’s Official!” A banner hung from the main hospital building announced to all walking by, “Doylestown Health is proud to be a part of Penn Medicine.”  

“In joining with Penn Medicine, we are writing the next chapter in our storied history that began more than 100 years ago,” said Doylestown Health CEO Jim Brexler. “It’s not a finish line that we’re at; today we’re at the starting line.” 

More than a century of caring for the community 

Long before it became a bustling health system with a 245-bed hospital, an urgent care center, a home care service, and multiple outpatient offices, Doylestown Health started with a notion. In 1895, 14 women saw a correlation between the area’s dusty, unpaved streets and respiratory illness among residents, and set about to improve the situation. This nascent Village Improvement Association (VIA) raised funds for a sprinkler truck to dampen the roads to improve the community’s health. But they didn’t stop there. 

In 1915, the group bought its first ambulance, a vital tool for transporting patients to the closest hospital—Abington—or even Philadelphia. The following year, the VIA established a visiting nurse service (a forerunner of today’s robust Doylestown Health Home Care) with some home visits by bicycle. Then in 1923, the eight-bed Doylestown Hospital opened, with a special emphasis on emergency care as well as maternal health and childbirth. 

Over the years, that civic can-do spirit has helped the hospital grow into a modern, comprehensive medical campus where more than 600 providers care for patients in over 50 specialties. Doylestown Health is especially known for its heart and vascular care, Cancer Institute, and maternity services, where the team delivered just over 900 babies in 2024. “The quality of care, and the training of the providers, are really what you would expect to find in an urban tertiary-care hospital—but it’s in the community,” said internist Nicole Geracimos, MD, president of the medical staff at Doylestown Health. 

Generations of families have passed through the hospital’s doors as patients, employees, or volunteers—sometimes in multiple roles. For example, Chris Nardo, a member of the health system’s board, notes that not only do he and his family receive care at Doylestown Health, but his mother-in-law served as a volunteer and his wife was once a teenage “candy striper” volunteer at the hospital. “It’s about community. It’s about connections. It’s about relationships.” 

Nardo is in good company. More than 500 people—from ages 15 to 102—serve as hospital volunteers, doing everything from administrative functions to greeting visitors to transporting patients and more. “Doylestown is a very tight-knit community, and when patients see their neighbors volunteering, it brings a sense of comfort,” said Karen Langley, MEd, director of Volunteer Services. “We believe part of the reason our patient satisfaction scores are high is because of our volunteers and what they bring to the hospital.” All told, this small army of locals who labor with love for the hospital contributed more than 73,000 volunteer hours in 2024; Langley estimates that their contributions, if paid, would be worth about $2.3 million. That money saved allows the health system to reinvest in the care it provides to patients. 

A pandemic and a partnership 

As it hit the century mark since its founding, Doylestown Health was holding its own as a community hospital, while competitors faced financial pressures to close or be taken over by larger health systems. The hospital’s focus on providing high-quality care coupled with its deep-rooted community support made it competitive. And then came COVID-19. 

It wasn’t Doylestown Health’s first rodeo. More than 100 years earlier, as the Great Influenza epidemic devastated many corners of the world, the VIA’s visiting nurse practice made a tangible difference in the region: Deaths from the virus in Doylestown were just one-third of what nearby town Perkasie experienced. Likewise, the modern-day hospital and health system weathered COVID with a commitment to providing the best care possible. 

But the pandemic had a depressing effect on the finances of health care systems big and small across the country, and Doylestown Health was no exception. “We wanted to maintain the employee base and continue to provide a high quality of care through the pandemic,” Nardo said. “Which we did, and we paid—literally—for it.” 

And so, a few years ago, Doylestown Health began looking to partner with a larger health system. Doing so would help steady the balance sheet, improve both purchasing power with suppliers and leverage in negotiating with health insurance companies, and continue the system’s mission of providing quality care close to home for members of the community.  

 Integrating with a large health system wasn’t a decision the Doylestown Health leadership team made lightly, according to Barbara Ann Price, chair of the Doylestown Hospital and the Doylestown Health Foundation boards. While they hired their first hospital administrator in 1960, the whole enterprise was governed by the women of the Village Improvement Association right up until the integration was finalized on April 1. “It’s been a community effort, to strive to have the best community hospital possible,” Price said. 

The idea of trading a measure of independence for a greater degree of security was initially unsettling for some. Christy “Cricket” Roberts, RN, BSN, CCRP, a staff nurse in the ICU, worried that the culture of care that made this hospital truly special might be lost in a transition to a bigger organization. “But when we heard it was Penn, that changed the tone completely,” she said. “The more I heard, the more I was excited about it.” 

It also helps that a relationship already existed between the health systems. For instance, Penn Radiation Oncology at Doylestown opened in 2011 and delivers care for more than 400 patients each year. Also, for more than a decade, Doylestown Hospital has been part of the Penn Cancer Network, collaborating with the Abramson Cancer Center to provide expanded access to treatments and clinical trials. 

A fitting collaboration 

Building off these connections, another reason that Penn Medicine felt like the right fit was a set of values that closely mirrored those of Doylestown Health. Both provide high-quality care, prize excellence and continuous improvement among care providers and staff, and seek avenues for collaboration. “Penn Medicine and Doylestown Health are very similar in a lot of ways, and one of the biggest ones, is the providers really don't practice in a silo,” said Geracimos. “Penn providers—inpatient, primary care, specialists—seem to work as a team, and that culture really does mirror what we have here.” 

That collaborative spirit promises to carry over to the relationship between Penn Medicine and Doylestown Health. “I personally think it’s a win-win,” said Nardo. The Doylestown Health community will get an enhanced level of “community-based quality,” as he put it, from Penn: the advantages of an academic medical center, including more opportunities to participate in clinical trials and access to leading-edge clinical advances, but close to home. And the health system will get to tap into Penn Medicine’s supply chain and relationships, which allow for economies of scale and more competitive pricing for supplies; and the larger organization’s ability to bargain for better reimbursement rates from insurers.  

With this partnership, Penn Medicine can commit more deeply to its promise of providing the right care for the right patient at the right place for more patients in the northern suburbs. (In addition to integrating with Doylestown Health, the health system also recently broke ground on a new multispecialty outpatient center in Montgomeryville.) Joining an organization that’s mission-driven to discover cures and increase access to state-of-the-art treatments is what many Doylestown Health supporters are looking forward to. “Penn has CAR T, mRNA, and other research ... to bring that to the community is fabulous,” said Price. “I’m excited about the technology too,” such as adopting the same electronic medical record system (Epic) that Penn and many other health systems use. 

A few weeks before the official integration date, several dozen administrative and clinical leaders from Doylestown Health went on a whirlwind tour of some of Penn Medicine’s Philadelphia locations, meeting their new colleagues at Pennsylvania Hospital and the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, and learning about Penn’s groundbreaking research as well as medical education and clinical training.  

Langley, the volunteer services director, was among them, and said they returned home genuinely inspired. “The good that we can do with these resources we’re going to have, it’s very humbling,” she has been telling her volunteers. “Kevin Mahoney talked about how no matter what your job is, you’re helping cure cancer and other diseases. We’ve always been part of something big, but now it’s something so much bigger.” 

That echoes what Mahoney told the throngs gathered in the chilly parking lot to celebrate Doylestown Health and Penn Medicine uniting as a larger organization. “You have my promise that we’re going to move forward together,” he said. “We’re going to make the world better.”