CARIBOU – The Cary Medical Center in Caribou and the Northern Maine Medical Center in Fort Kent have joined forces in a new venture to offer home health services to Aroostook County and northern areas of Washington and Penobscot counties.

The two hospitals have formed a six-person board of directors to oversee the operation of Aroostook Home Health Services, an 18-year-old home health care agency. The two hospitals have purchased the service, which has been operating since 1983.

The service has 165 full-time, part-time and per diem employees working out of four satellite offices in Fort Kent, Caribou, Presque Isle and Houlton.

The agency provides services by registered nurses, certified nurse aides, personal care attendants and homemaker services attendants.

Aroostook Home Health Services, a for-profit service, had been operated by an independent board of directors. That board had wanted to sell the agency for some time. The service now will be a nonprofit corporation.

In turn, Cary and NMMC had held internal talks for some time about going into after-hospital health care services.

“We had been talking about this for some 18 months,” Kris Doody-Chabre, chief operating officer at Cary, said Friday. “It is a continuum of care now attached to the two hospitals.

“It’s a real good opportunity for both hospitals to work collaboratively on a project involving health care,” she said.

“We, Cary and NMMC, decided to get together to see if we were interested in continuing health care services,” Martin Bernstein, NMMC executive director, said Thursday. “Home health care offers health services that are less costly than in-hospital services.

“We saw the benefit to both hospitals,” he said. “We also did not want to see this service go down the tubes.”

Both officials said home health care is a service needed by many people discharged from long-term facilities or hospitals. Home health care is a short-term service term for most patients.

Officials at Cary talked to several agencies during their deliberations. Aroostook Home Health Services officials, Doody-Chabre said, wanted to sell their agency, which had become a challenge for them to operate.

She said changes in health care services, brought on by the federal Balanced Budget Act that changed reimbursement schedules for services, had a big effect on the decision for the service to sell its agency.

“They were not hospital administrators, and it became a challenge for them to keep it viable,” she said. “Home health care is an important piece of health care services, and the service needed to remain viable.”

For the present, both administrators said, the services of Aroostook Home Health Services will remain the same, and the four satellite offices will remain open.

Both hospital administrators said changes may come in the future to improve the service, but only after the operation has been evaluated. Jobs in the agency are secure, Bernstein said.

The new venture will be overseen by a new board of directors made up of three people each from Cary and NMMC. The presidency of the new board will alternate annually between the two hospitals.

Doody-Chabre is president for this year. Other members of the board from Cary are Rob Kieffer, chairman of the Cary board of directors; and Galen Dickinson, chief financial officer at Cary. Bernstein, vice president of the board, is joined by Peter Sirois, associate director at NMMC; and Dan Vaillancourt, chairman of the NMMC board of directors.

Bernstein said the service had been operating at a near break-even point. The service has had problems in the past, but consultants hired by Cary and NMMC believe the service should at least break even or do better.

“We feel confident we can make it work, together,” Bernstein said. “The former owners wanted to see the service continue, and we both believe it can be profitable.”