Prisma Health Surgery Center - Patewood. | Photo courtesy of AtlasThe ambulatory surgery center (ASC) joint venture landscape is primed for a big year. Atlas Healthcare Partners is ready to capitalize on that momentum.
The Phoenix-based ASC development and management company announced Thursday that it has inked a new partnership with Prisma Health to expand outpatient surgical capacity across the Southeast, adding another large not-for-profit system to its roster of JV partners.
“We continue to make great progress with our current JV partners in terms of adding new ASCs as well as growing our current ASCs,” Atlas President and CEO Aric Burke told ASC News. “We added 13 new ASCs last year, which is a pretty significant number across all of our markets.”
The Atlas-Prisma JV underscores a broader shift underway as health systems look to scale ASC networks amid regulatory change, rising competition and accelerating case migration out of hospital operating rooms.
In many ways, Prisma was a perfect JV partner for Atlas, according to Burke.
Prisma Health operates 19 acute and specialty hospitals, with 3,131 licensed beds, 320 practice sites, and more than 5,900 employed and independent clinicians. It serves more than 1.6 million patients in South Carolina and Tennessee each year.
“Partnership is – for us – a hopefully ‘forever relationship,’” Burke emphasized. “And we want to find that true alignment culturally.”
A growing ASC platform
Founded in 2019, Atlas Healthcare Partners was built around a simple premise: partner with large, regionally dominant health systems to develop and operate ASCs that extend their surgical footprint beyond hospital walls.
Today, Atlas is the ASC partner of Banner Health, MultiCare, Corewell Health, ChristianaCare and now Prisma Health. Fueled with those partnerships, the company has grown to 49 ASCs in seven states, with its facilities performing over 117,000 annual cases and posting roughly $407 million in annual ASC revenue.
Broadly, Atlas’ model centers on long-term alignment with health systems and physicians, Burke noted.
“The most important is the alignment,” he said. “Looking for a system that really believes in the need for an ASC strategy, first and foremost – and the value of a partner.”
In terms of potential JV fits, Atlas evaluates many factors. For starters, the company tends to explore JVs with larger health systems that have patient revenues of around $3 billion or higher, according to Burke. Often, when health systems get to that size and scale, they need a trusted partner to help them manage and grow their ASC capabilities.
“When you have more than three to five centers in your network, you really need to bring in that expertise and experience to help you further develop your network and manage it to an optimal level,” Burke said.
Geography matters as well.
“Some states are more challenging than others, and so we look at all those factors,” Burke continued. “But at the end of the day, it comes down to finding a really good partner.”
While Atlas added more than a dozen ASCs in 2025, it doesn’t plan on slowing down any time soon. In fact, Atlas has 15 ASCs under development in its JV markets, either via acquisition or through de novo openings, according to Burke.
“We really just continue to focus on growing our current markets with new ASCs, and then continuing to raise the bar on our ASCs in terms of operational efficiencies, the service provided to our additional patients and … the profitability of those ASCs,” he said.
Details of the Prisma Health JV
Atlas’ joint venture with Greenville, South Carolina-based Prisma Health is, in some ways, a first.
Under the agreement, Prisma and Atlas plan to develop and operate more than 15 ASCs across key markets including Greenville-Spartanburg, Columbia, Charleston, South Carolina’s coastal region and southeastern Tennessee. The partnership started with the transition of two existing and two new Prisma Health ASCs into the JV, with Atlas assuming management responsibilities.
Normally, Atlas is able to source new JV partners via its current ones.
“One of the unique aspects of Atlas is that our health system partners are also investors in Atlas, and so they’ve been instrumental in helping connect us to other health systems across the country,” Burke said.
That wasn’t the case with Prisma.
“It came from an investment banker,” Burke recalled. “Goldman Sachs had a … client in Prisma who was looking at a lot of changes coming to South Carolina. CON was being repealed in the state, and the competition was heating up for ASCs, in general. Prisma was looking for a partner where they were kind of reaching that critical mass point.”
“They had a couple ASC of their own, wanted to develop more, realized that there’s going to be a lot of [procedure] shifts out of the hospitals in the future, and they needed to bring in a partner that could help them navigate that,” he added.
The JV took roughly 18 months from initial discussions to formation, and the joint venture formally launched June 1, 2025.
Since then, Atlas has moved swiftly to integrate the assets.
“We’ve made a lot of really good progress from an integration standpoint,” Burke said.
Integration, he explained, can often be granular and highly operational.
“If you look at each ASC individually, they’re all unique,” Burke said. “You need to really assess and do your diligence on the ASC, assess [to get to] the right plan.”
Typically, ASC employees transition to Atlas, new technology systems are installed, and revenue cycle and back-office functions are centralized.
“We develop a very detailed work plan and project plan, and we manage it like a project until it’s wholly integrated and transitioned,” Burke said.
Interoperability, he added, is becoming increasingly important as ASCs sit within broader health system ecosystems.
Prisma is just the start of Atlas’ 2026 ambitions. The company’s goal is to keep expanding its roster of partners, targeting four or five new JVs for 2026.
“Our goal is to continue to add new JV partners each year,” Burke said.
Scaling infrastructure is central to that effort.
“In order to provide great service and partnership to our system partners and our physicians, we need to continue to scale out our infrastructure and our services, and we made a lot of great progress in that area in 2025,” Burke said.
Specifically, Atlas expects two more JV announcements within the next 30 days or so, according to the CEO.
“Partnership is – for us – a hopefully ‘forever relationship.’”
Atlas President and CEO Aric Burke
Seeing the big picture
From a macro-perspective, the Prisma JV comes as outpatient migration accelerates and payers expand reimbursement for ASC-appropriate procedures.
“With more and more cases becoming ASC appropriate and now paid for by the payers, you’ve got to think through the whole acuity continuum within each service line, thinking about what should move out of the health system ORs,” Burke said. “Sometimes it’s due to capacity. Sometimes it’s due to margin pressure. Sometimes it’s due to competition. But it’s really being deliberate about what should shift and when it should shift.”
For health systems, ASCs can relieve hospital capacity constraints, improve margins on appropriate cases and blunt competitive threats from independent physician groups or national ASC operators.
Atlas works with partners on foundational questions, including where ASCs should be located, what the overall network needs to look like and what kind of ASCs they need to have access to.
Equally important is physician alignment.
What’s more, ASCs can be used as a workforce lever of sorts.
“ASCs are a great tool, ultimately, for recruiting surgeons into the medical group and into the centers – and also retaining,” Burke said. “We see higher retention rates, lower turnover within the medical group, when physicians are owners in an ASC.”
The benefits, he argued, extend back to the hospital.
“We believe there’s also a halo effect where strong ASC performance and relationships with physicians also leads to stronger hospital performance,” Burke said. “Because those physicians also need inpatient OR time and ancillary referrals, and it just creates a really strong ecosystem for the health system and for the doctors.”
