In Vancouver, 59 medical laboratory employees of PeaceHealth are being affected by the planned sale of its “outreach” lab operations to New Jersey-based Quest Diagnostics Inc.
The deal, announced in February, has as many as 500 PeaceHealth lab workers in Washington, Oregon and Alaska receiving layoff notices. The workers now are scrambling to find new jobs with Quest or within other PeaceHealth operations.
Quest, a $7.5-billion publicly traded company, is acquiring PeaceHealth labs that provide blood, urine and other testing services for PeaceHealth clinics and medical centers, as well as for independent clients. Quest also will assume management of 11 labs, which PeaceHealth will continue to own.
Dollar value of the acquisition, expected to close sometime in the second quarter possibly as early as April 30, has not been disclosed.
PeaceHealth is a not-for-profit health care system headquartered in Vancouver, which operates 10 medical centers and 14 medical groups. With 16,000 employees including 4,718 just in Clark County, PeaceHealth is among the region’s largest employers.
Quest spokesperson, Wendy Bost, said that it plans to fill 275 new positions in connection with the PeaceHealth agreement and has hosted two sets of job fairs in Vancouver, Bellingham and Eugene/Springfield, Ore. to recruit workers.
“We need qualified people to support these operations,” Bost said. “Our core business is providing quality and cost-effective clinical laboratory services. This frees up PeaceHealth to focus on its core business of patient care.”
Bost said the majority of the 275 Quest positions will be in Oregon and Washington.
“We expect the new positions to largely focus on servicing this acquired business,” she said. Quest already operates two labs in Washington (Puyallup and Fife) and three labs in Oregon (Portland, Salem and Roseburg), as well as a full-service lab in Seattle.
Kevin Snyder, PeaceHealth system vice president of communications, said PeaceHealth has been providing job-search support for lab employees affected by the sale.
“We know that many of our people have been attending the job fairs,” Snyder said.
PeaceHealth is also providing a severance package based on years of service and pay level for those losing their jobs.
Some lab workers, according to the Register-Guard newspaper in Eugene, are complaining that if they do not land a job with Quest or they refuse to accept an equivalent job offered somewhere within the three-state PeaceHealth system, they will not receive severance.
Snyder said the PeaceHealth decision to sell its lab business was “not really a cost-saving measure” and that the transition should be seamless for patients and physicians.
“By partnering with Quest, we are ensuring that we will continue to access the highest quality of lab services, offering best practices and the newest technology,” he said. “This decision was made with patients at the heart of why we’re making the change. It allows us not to have to keep up, knowing that the cost of these services will continue to grow.”
Based in Madison, N.J., Quest Diagnostics is a Fortune 500 company with 43,000 employees nationwide. Its shares trade on the NYSE using the stock symbol DGX. In the past 52 weeks, the Quest share price has increased 40 percent to $98.
Quest reported 2016 revenue of $7.5 billion, up 2.1 percent from 2015. The stock is rated as a “sell” by S&P Capital IQ and a “hold” by Thomson Reuters.
PeaceHealth employs 16,000 people system-wide as well as 900 people working in its group practice clinics. A faith-based organization, it was founded in 1890 by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace to provide care in the Pacific Northwest.
