Ontario's Prime Healthcare hits 55 hospitals with its ninth Chicago-area deal

Citrus Belt Review: Prime Healthcare closed its purchase of Franciscan Health Olympia Fields on May 1 after a unanimous 8-0 approval from the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board. The 214-bed hospital is Prime's 55th nationally and its ninth in the Chicago area. The Ontario-based company now operates in 15 states with more than 360 outpatient locations and over 60,000 staff and affiliated physicians — by its own description, the fourth-largest for-profit health system in the country.

Olympia Fields caps a fast buying run. Prime took over eight Ascension hospitals across Illinois in March 2025 and added Central Maine Healthcare's three-hospital system early this year, pushing its nonprofit Prime Healthcare Foundation to 21 hospitals. The company says it has put more than $104 million into its Illinois hospitals in the first year and preserved over 13,000 healthcare jobs there.

The capital markets story is what makes the run possible. Prime completed a $1.5 billion financing in September 2024, and the debt markets have rewarded the strategy since: Moody's raised its credit rating and Fitch rated the company B+ in August 2025, according to Becker's Hospital Review. Prime has also been buying back its own real estate from Medical Properties Trust — $350 million for five facilities in 2024, part of more than $870 million the company says it has reinvested over four years to pull its hospitals out of sale-leaseback debt. A private company, Prime reports quarterly earnings to bondholders like a public one.

All of it runs from 3480 E. Guasti Road in Ontario, where the centralized corporate functions — finance, revenue cycle, legal — scale with every acquisition. Prime's corridor footprint includes Chino Valley Medical Center, Montclair Hospital Medical Center, and Desert Valley Hospital in Victorville.