Bend Memorial Clinic on NE Neff Road in Bend as seen in 2018, the same year BMC was renamed Summit Medical Group Oregon-Bend Memorial Clinic as part of its new partnership.

Summit Health, with clinics in Redmond, Bend and Sisters, has been acquired by Walgreens through its VillageMD company.

The sale of Summit Health and its partner company Summit Health-CityMD is worth close to $9 billion, according to an announcement by VillageMD, which is part of Walgreens. Summit has been part of Central Oregon’s health care landscape since 2018 and was formed through a partnership between Bend Memorial Clinic and Summit Health management.

With more than 500,000 outpatient visits a year, Summit Health expects to close the deal in the first quarter 2023, said Jeff Alter, company CEO. Patients can expect the Summit Health brand to be maintained, Alter said.

“(We) remain committed to delivering excellent care to our patients. As part of VillageMD, we will build on our mission to provide leading primary, specialty, and urgent care while also driving clinical outcomes and cost savings,” Alter said. “It’s thrilling to be taking a giant leap forward in our mission to transform the way health care is delivered.”

Walgreens and rival CVS Pharmacy, two retail pharmacy chains with thousands of locations, have evolved in recent years with a greater focus on overall care for customers, trying to help them avoid chronic health conditions and expensive hospital stays. That goes far beyond their historic focus on store sales and filling prescriptions.

The deal to combine VillageMD and CityMD arrives just two months after CVS Health Corp., the parent company, said it would pay about $8 billion to acquire Signify Health, a technology company that sends doctors and other care providers to people’s homes to assess how they are doing and what help they might need.

Walgreens Boots Alliance, which has a 53% controlling interest in VillageMD, will invest $3.5 billion in debt and equity in support of the deal, which is expected to close in the first quarter of 2023.

In what the companies are calling a “strategic collaboration,” Evernorth, a subsidiary of health insurance giant Cigna Health, is also making an undisclosed investment in the deal and will become a minority owner of VillageMD.

Summit has been on its own path of expansion in Central Oregon. In September it announced a partnership with Bend Surgery Center and Bend Transitional Care to provide skilled home nursing teams to work with short term surgical patients.

In 2020 Summit Medical Group merged with The Center, Orthopedic & Neurosurgical Care & Research to become the largest multispecialty physician groups in Central Oregon with 130 providers operating in primary care, urgent care and more than 30 medical specialties.

Summit Health is a nationwide company employing more than 2,800 providers, 13,000 employees, and over 370 locations in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

Summit, which is based in New Jersey, had previously been known as Summit Medical Group and changed its name to Summit Health in 2021.

Walgreens, which has about 13,000 retail pharmacy locations worldwide, including 9,000 in the United States, has invested billions of dollars in VillageMD and is opening primary care practices next to its drugstores so that pharmacies and physician offices can more easily work together.

Village Medical provides primary care for patients at its traditional stand-alone practices, through its Village Medical at Walgreens practices, at home and through virtual visits. Chicago’s VillageMD and Village Medical operate in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Texas, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, Florida and Georgia and Kentucky, with more than 1.6 million patients.

Walgreens, which has its headquarters outside of Chicago, also is developing centers across the United States that use automated technology to fill prescriptions and deliver them to pharmacies, giving pharmacists more time to work with customers.

When Walgreens released details of its annual financial performance last month, CEO Rosalind Brewer proclaimed it was the first year of Walgreens’ “transformation to a consumer-centric health care company.”

Citing the combination of VillageMD and CityMD, Walgreens raised its 2025 U.S. health care sales goal to between $14.5 billion and $16 billion, up from the previous forecast range of $11 billion to $12 billion.

Walgreens shares rose more than 2% Monday.

— CO Media reporter Suzanne Roig contributed to this report.