Hunter
01/24/24

The Iowa Board of Regents is meeting today to consider amending the bylaws for the newly-acquired Mercy Iowa City hospital campus.

The Gazette reports the bankrupt hospital is expected to change ownership to University of Iowa Healthcare by the end of the month and is to be renamed UI Health Care Medical Center Downtown.  Board of Regents documents indicated the proposed bylaws are based on Mercy Hospital’s original documents but would include modifications that would better align with the medical staff bylaws of UI Health Care to ensure consistent processes and information sharing between locations.

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Mercy is not a closed campus like the UIHC, which requires providers to be employees of the UIHC to practice there. The Regents stress that the university has committed to maintaining open status at the Mercy campus so that physicians from other clinics and practices are allowed medical privileges there as long as they have an active office within the geographic area of the downtown campus.

Under the amended bylaws, each current department would continue to have a department head that would serve a two year term. However, the Medical Executive Committee would periodically assess the structure of the medicine, surgery, maternal and child health care, family practice, and emergency medicine departments and have the power to recommend changes like creating new, combining, or eliminating departments.