The dozen-member Board of Stewardship Trustees of the new entity will be evenly split, with six members from each present board, plus both co-CEOs. Plans now call for the corporate headquarters to be located in Chicago.

At present the newly agreed-upon entity remains unnamed, with plans now calling for naming to happen later in 2018. In the meantime, various facilities will run under their present names.

The schedule also calls for the merger to close toward the latter half of 2018, depending on government and church approvals.

Explorative talks for a merger began in October, 2016, at which time the pair signed a non-binding letter of intent.

In September 2016, the two created Precision Medicine Alliance in order to build the biggest community-based precision medicine program in the country.

The move has been seen by some as a way to “protect turf,” according to Forbes.

It comes on the heels of the CVS Health and Aetna deal announcement, and at the same time as Advocate and Aurora revealed merger plans.

All of these mergers, of course, are taking place beneath the looming shadow of Amazon's reported acquisition of pharmacy wholesaler licenses in over a dozen states, according to Bloomberg.

The business wire stated that it had determined that the licenses were in Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, North Dakota, Oregon, Alabama, Louisiana, New Jersey, Michigan, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Utah and Iowa — plus a pending one in Maine.

Of the online giant's potential impact, Chip Davis, president of medication trade group the Association for Accessible Medicines told the news service that, “size and scale-wise, they can disrupt anywhere they want to disrupt.”

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