The Colorado Attorney General has received a notice of transaction related to the affiliation of Estes Park Health with UCHealth, according to an email sent today to the Estes Valley Voice from Lawrence Pacheco, the director of communications for the Colorado Attorney General.
No specific date has been set for the transfer. The attorney general’s office has 60 days to review the plan before finalizing the merger. The hospital will be rebranded as UCHealth Estes Valley Medical Center if approved.
The state’s Hospital Transfer Act, C.R.S. § 6-19-101 et seq., requires the attorney general to sign off on the affiliation plan after making sure the transfer does not result in material changes in the charitable purposes of the hospital’s assets and that the assets do not leave the state.
At the May 28 meeting of the Park Hospital District Board, CEO Vern Carda reported that a couple of due diligence items still were outstanding, but that the board, EPH administrators, and UCHealth were “moving toward another level” in the affiliation process.
Carda also reported that staff meetings had been held and human resources departments were “working toward integration.”
On May 2, 2023, voters of the Park Hospital District approved a ballot question giving the hospital’s board authority to find a non-profit healthcare system to partner with to stabilize local hospital operations. On Jan. 30, 2024, four months before that vote was taken, the PHD Board entered into a non-disclosure agreement with UCHealth.
UCHealth, which is headquartered in Aurora, Colo., operates facilities throughout Colorado and affiliated hospitals in Wyoming and Nebraska. UCHealth was founded in 2012 with the merger of the University of Colorado Hospital and the Poudre Valley Health System. UCHealth is the largest health care system in Colorado. It operates 14 acute-care hospitals, 200 clinics, and has 33,000 employees.
Over the past two and a half years, the EPH board has met more than 200 times in closed-door executive sessions not open to the public to hone details of an affiliation.
On Oct. 16, the Board of Estes Park Health released a statement announcing it had signed a letter of intent to affiliate with UCHealth. The letter had been signed on Oct. 3.
At a public meeting on Oct. 23, 2024, the EPH Board of Directors introduced UCHealth officials to Estes Park residents and approved a resolution cementing the deal.
That resolution authorized senior executives and advisors to execute a final version of the agreement, remove all contingencies, and consummate the transaction.
The agreement includes new bylaws for the Park Hospital District Board of Directors, which will not be effective until all integration details have been completed. After the affiliation is finalized, the PHD board, which is elected by the voters who live in the special district boundaries, will be responsible for setting the mill levy to collect property taxes. All income earned by EPH will be transferred to UCHealth. A new board appointed by UCHealth will assume authority over the hospital’s policies.
The Park Hospital District, which has met in executive session three times since the last public board meeting on May 28, 2025, is scheduled to hold a public board meeting on Wednesday, June 25, at 5:30. The meeting will take place in the Board Room at Town Hall, 170 MacGregor Ave.
Since the last public board meeting, the chief nursing officer, Pat Samples, and the chief financial officer, Aysha Douglas, have resigned.