McLaren Health Care in Grand Blanc, a $6.9 billion health system with hospitals and multispecialty medical campuses throughout Michigan, has announced that Clarkston Medical Group (CMG) has joined the system.
CMG, based in Clarkston, is a regional network of primary and specialty care providers serving northern Oakland County and its surrounding communities. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The joining of the two organizations builds on a longstanding partnership, most notably through their shared work at the McLaren Clarkston medical campus since 2009. CMG, with 54 providers, has 11 locations in Clarkston, Pontiac, and Bloomfield Hills.
Under the new organizational structure, CMG will continue to operate within the newly formed McLaren Community Based Primary Care Group, a subsidiary of the McLaren Medical Group, and retain its teams of clinical and support staffs.
“The Clarkston Medical providers and care staffs have earned and maintained the trust of thousands of families over its many years, and we are proud to bring them into the organization,” says Phil Incarnati, president and CEO of McLaren Health Care.
“Together, with our shared access and resources, we aim to further expand the availability of coordinated, patient-focused care while also ensuring patients continue to receive the same level of service they have come to expect and rely upon.”
The alliance is designed to position each organization to better serve the large and growing patient population in Oakland County.
“For more than six decades, Clarkston Medical Group has been driven by our commitment to providing accessible, high-quality health care,” said Dr. Renny Abraham, CEO of Clarkston Medical Group. “Joining McLaren will allow us to further that commitment with the addition of expanded resources, clinical collaborations, and partnerships that provide our patients with broader access to specialty care.”
Founded as a single office in 1961, Clarkston Medical has grown and expanded its service over the past several decades caring for tens of thousands of patients across northern Oakland County and surrounding communities.
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In Related News, McLaren Health Care and its McLaren Heart & Vascular Institute have launched a first-of-its-kind cardiovascular screening program in Michigan to strengthen and expand its ability to identify patients’ risk for heart disease earlier and connect them with timely, appropriate care.
Launched in partnership with Bunkerhill Health and its AI-powered Carebricks platform, the program applies its technology to patients’ clinical data already available to McLaren through those patients’ routine chest CT scans previously performed for other medical reasons.
The platform’s FDA-cleared clinical algorithms detect and measure incidental coronary artery calcium (iCAC) and incidental aortic valve calcium (iAVC), indicators for the presence and development of coronary heart disease and aortic stenosis, common forms of heart disease that worsen over time if left untreated. McLaren has already launched the process of scanning routine chest CTs from the past 12 months, and early results have yielded remarkable findings.
McLaren is the first Michigan health system — and one of just five in the nation — to deploy AI-powered aortic valve calcium detection on routine chest CT scans. Bunkerhill’s AVC algorithm is the first FDA-cleared solution for detecting and evaluating aortic valve calcium in routine chest CTs.
Previously, to determine their risk for heart disease, patients would often require specialized cardiac CT imaging scans and a time-consuming review by a clinician, which has limited the wide availability of a dedicated screening program. As a result, many opportunities to detect heart disease earlier and begin preventive care have been largely missed.
With iCAC and iAVC, McLaren can now identify these risks using routine chest CT scans ordered for unrelated medical reasons, including lung cancer screening or the evaluation of an infection, among others. These types of scans are ordered much more frequently than specialized cardiac CTs.
This approach allows McLaren to promptly identify and notify more patients for timely follow-up and preventive care without requiring additional and specialized tests or imaging.
Similar dedicated screening programs are currently being performed at select health systems around the country, including the Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, West Virginia University Medicine, and the University of Texas Medical Branch, among others.
McLaren Health Care includes 12 hospitals across the state, ambulatory surgery centers, imaging centers, a 730-member employed primary and specialty care physician network, commercial and Medicaid HMOs covering more than 242,000 Michigan people, home health, infusion and hospice providers, pharmacy services, a clinical laboratory network, and a wholly owned medical malpractice insurance company.
McLaren operates Michigan’s largest network of cancer centers and providers, anchored by the Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit, a National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center. McLaren has 20,000 full-, part-time, and contracted employees and more than 93,000 network providers throughout Michigan and Ohio.
For more information, visit mclaren.org.
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