Endeavor Health, including its nine Chicago-area hospitals, announced Wednesday it plans to merge under the umbrella of Rush University System for Health, according to hospital officials.
For now, not much will change for patients as the proposed merger will undergo a regulatory process that could take months before it’s approved. If approved, the combined the health system would include 12 hospitals in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs, which could make it one of the largest health systems in the area.
Endeavor Health hospitals include Swedish Hospital, Evanston Hospital, Edward Hospital, Skokie Hospital, Elmhurst Hospital, Glenbrook Hospital, Highland Park Hospital, Linden Oaks Hospital and Northwest Community Hospital. Under the proposed merger, the hospitals would continue to operate but with Rush branding.
Dr. Omar Lateef, president and CEO of the Rush University System for Health and Rush University Medical Center, said the goal is to improve access to patients and opportunities for its workforce. The proposed combined system would include its current hospitals — Rush University Medical Center, Rush Copley Medical Center and Rush Oak Park Hospital.
“If you need a clinical trial, this should open up clinical trials,” Lateef said. “If you need access to a higher level or a more local type of care, then you can get it where you are. The goal of this is to enhance access, to take the highest quality of care and expand it to all our sites and make any patient who is in that site seamlessly able to go to another site.”
If the merger closes, Lateef would take on a role as CEO emeritus and serve as a strategic adviser while J.P. Gallagher, the current leader of Endeavor Health, will become the president and CEO of the new combined health system, according to a news release.
The merger between two of the biggest hospital systems in the Chicago area would create a more than $10 billion giant and comes as Endeavor inches back from a financial loss, records show.
Endeavor had around $6.4 billion in 2025, but lost around $34 million that year, and lost nearly $500 million the year before mostly due to legal settlements, records show. So far this year, Endeavor looks to be turning those losses around.
Rush had around $4.4 billion in revenue in 2026. Both are nonprofits.
The proposed combined system is part of a larger trend of consolidation happening in hospital markets across the country, said Zachary Levinson, project director of KFF Project on Hospital Costs. KFF is a nonprofit health policy research, polling and news organization.
Mergers can help hospitals operate more efficiently and help those financially struggling keep their doors open, Levinson said. But it could also drive up the cost for patients.
“Mergers often reduce competition and that could allow hospitals to charge more for care,” Levinson said. “When you look at the research, there’s now a substantial body of evidence finding that consolidation has lead to higher prices without clear effects on quality.”
It’s likely consolidation among hospitals will continue in response to cuts to federal healthcare spending, Levinson said.
Gallagher said the economic pressures facing healthcare did not directly lead to the merger, but he did want to ensure the Endeavor institutions continued to serve its workforce and community for decades to come.
“This is kind of a long-term bet on being able to not just weather some of those pressures, but frankly, be strong and do some things differently that allow us to improve what that care and experience looks like even in light of the environment,” Gallagher said.
The merger will come with a $1 billion investment from Endeavor’s endowment that will fund community programs, innovation along with research and academics at the combined system, Gallagher and Lateef said.
“We know that right now there is a massive health care shortage of providers in this country,” Lateef said. “There are not enough nurses, there are not enough doctors, there are not enough ultrasound techs. We have a health science university and we are committed to increasing our existing workforce, and we’re going to take that money and help grow our existing programs.”
The investment will also be used toward research efforts delving into health equity and neuroscience, Lateef said. Other funds will be used for Rush programs that aim to reduce the life expectancy gap in Chicago.
Bringing together different workplace cultures is one of the biggest risks in mergers, said Lynne Barnes, a clinical professor and program director for the master of health administration at the University of Illinois. But Barnes said she sees an exciting opportunity to bridge the academic side of Rush’s work with the services provided at Endeavor facilities.
“The challenges for the leaders will be a fun one — to knit those two systems together and bring out the best of each of them in the other,” Barnes said. “There’s a lot of opportunity in that merger.”
Mergers are bound to bring changes, and Barnes said it’s important for leaders to make employees feel included in well-planned, communicated changes. Otherwise, leaders risk employees becoming frustrated, she said.
The announcement comes as nurses at Rush and Endeavor in recent months have separately gone public with their efforts to unionize their workplaces, many citing concerns about nurse-to-patient ratios. Just this week, nurses at Edward Hospital in Naperville announced they had filed a petition to hold an election, a step toward unionizing under the umbrella of the National Nurses Organizing Committee.
Nurses at Rush University Medical Center voted earlier this year to form a union under the same umbrella, which is an affiliate of the larger National Nurses United.
In a statement, Brenda Langford, a Stroger Hospital nurse and member of the National Nurses Organizing Committee board of directors, said nurses worry that mergers result in cuts to hospital services and drive up the cost of healthcare.
“Nurses call on state and federal regulators to block any merger that fails to guarantee all services are protected and nurses demand that we have a voice in the future of any merged health system. We know what happens when the state fails to act,” Langford said in the statement, adding that other recent hospital consolidations has lead to cuts to certain medical services.
Nurses at Endeavor hospitals in Evanston, Skokie, Glenbrook and Highland Park have also been organizing under a different union, Teamsters Local 743. In a statement, the union said the proposed merger highlights why nurses need representation.
“During mergers and other workplace changes, workers must have protection and a voice in decisions that affect them because they are the ones who make these health systems successful,” the Teamsters said in the statement.
Lateef said the merger will provide more opportunities for nurses.
“Nurses at Endeavor are vital to our mission; they’re vital to our identity and a critical part of everything that we do,” Gallagher said. “We have been very actively engaged, listening and meeting with our nurses and understanding what’s important to them. And we’ve made very significant investments and we’ll continue to do that as a part of our future both near term and long term.”
WBEZ’s Kristen Schorsch contributed.
