Colorado’s second-largest health insurer is halfway through a shift that will move the Denver-area physicians it employs to different health systems’ hospitals, changing their patients’ options for future medical care.
Doctors employed by Kaiser Permanente Colorado who specialize in cardiology, orthopedics and general surgery began leaving Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver and Good Samaritan Hospital in Lafayette in April. Neurologists, oncologists and obstetricians will follow between June and September.
Those physicians are relocating to St. Anthony Hospital in Lakewood, St. Anthony North Hospital in Westminster and HCA HealthOne Rose and HCA HealthOne Presbyterian St. Luke’s, both in Denver.
Last year, Kaiser announced new partnerships with CommonSpirit Health and HCA HealthOne. It also added CommonSpirit’s Longmont United Hospital and OrthoColorado Hospital, in Lakewood, to its network, but won’t station its physicians at those two locations.
At the same time, Kaiser started to wind down a partnership with three Intermountain Health hospitals. Previously, doctors employed by Kaiser could see their hospitalized patients at Saint Joseph or Good Samaritan hospitals. Lutheran Hospital in Wheat Ridge also was in-network, but Kaiser physicians didn’t work there.
Kaiser runs both an insurance company and clinics that care for its roughly 64,000 customers statewide, most of whom live in the Denver area. It doesn’t own hospitals in Colorado, so it has a network of facilities where its patients can go for that level of care. The doctors it employs work at some of the in-network hospitals.
Part of the reason for the shift was so Kaiser could sell more traditional insurance plans, where people can choose doctors the system employs or others in a broader network, said Mike Ramseier, president of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Colorado.
It also gave existing customers more choices and helped keep costs down, he said.
“We can be way more flexible,” Ramseier said.
The departures won’t affect patients who aren’t insured by Kaiser, because those physicians rarely saw patients with other coverage, said Scott Peek, president of Intermountain Health’s Front Range facilities, including Saint Joseph, Good Samaritan and Lutheran.
The Intermountain hospitals will remain in-network for Kaiser patients through the end of 2026, but patients planning a procedure should check with their insurance to decide where to go, he said.
“We encourage them to call Kaiser to have the latest and greatest” information, he said.
Patients pay a larger share of their hospital bills if they go to an out-of-network facility than if they stay in-network. Emergency care is an exception; federal and state law only allow insurers to charge the in-network rate, regardless of where the patient has to go.
Kaiser’s team is reaching out to patients who have scheduled upcoming procedures to talk about their options, though they expect most patients will choose to follow their doctors and have their surgeries or births at the new locations, Ramseier said. So far, the transition has been smooth, he said.
“It’s gone extremely well,” he said.
The HealthOne hospitals have enough beds available to handle additional patients from Kaiser, and are hiring nurses and support staff to take care of them, said Chad Christianson, president and CEO of HCA HealthOne.
The two systems already worked together at HCA HealthOne Swedish in Englewood and Sky Ridge in Lone Tree, and the services that are moving over are ones where HCA’s two Denver hospitals excel, he said.
“That’s really strength on strength,” he said.
St. Anthony’s North was already expanding, so bringing in the Kaiser physicians made sense now, said Ryan Tobin, Denver market president for CommonSpirit Health. The main St. Anthony’s campus is also adding beds, so it will have plenty of capacity for everyone, he said.
CommonSpirit also previously worked with Kaiser in southern Colorado.
“Our job is to take care of the community,” he said. “We’re excited about the future.”
Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get health news sent straight to your inbox.