The health system that runs Billings Clinic and the former Logan Health hospitals has a new name. As of this week it is One Sky Health.
The change was announced Nov. 10 in the Billings Clinic atrium, three years after Billings Clinic and Kalispell-based Logan Health combined in 2023. The organization covers more than 25 hospitals and clinics and about 9,000 employees across Montana and northern Wyoming, according to Montana Free Press. It says it has more than 1,200 physicians and advanced practitioners working in more than 85 specialties, over a service area of more than 150,000 square miles.
Patients will not see much change right away. Signs will be replaced over the next two to three years, starting with key locations, and patients keep the same doctors and care teams.
Local names stay, with a prefix
Individual hospitals keep their familiar names under the new banner. The Billings hospital becomes One Sky Health Billings Clinic. In the Flathead, it will be One Sky Health Kalispell Medical Center and One Sky Health North Valley Hospital in Whitefish, CEO Dr. Clint Seger told NBC Montana. Logan Health’s network also includes hospitals in several small Hi-Line communities, and Billings Clinic runs satellite sites in Bozeman, Red Lodge and Columbus, among others.
Seger said staff floated almost 600 name ideas. The team wanted something short, with no made-up words, and it had to be a name nobody else had trademarked.
“As an organization, you get to a point where we’re not going to feel like one organization until we have a single brand,” he said.
Why the name waited three years
The two systems have been under one administrative roof since 2023 but were not fully integrated. For much of that time, the Logan Health hospitals did not share a patient-records system with Billings Clinic.
That is close to done. Seger said that by spring every One Sky Health hospital and clinic will be on the same electronic health record. Kalispell and Whitefish are the last two facilities still to switch. For patients, that should mean a doctor in one city can see a chart from another without a records request.
Employees across the system are also moving onto one benefits plan for the first time. Open enrollment started Nov. 11, and Seger said the system can offer medical, dental and vision coverage to all employees without raising rates from this year.
He gave one example of what integration is supposed to fix. Billings and Kalispell each have a single pediatric endocrinologist on staff, the specialist who treats children with diabetes and other hormone conditions. When either one takes time off, local families lose access. With the two systems working as one, each can cover calls for the other.
“It’s making sure the bottom doesn’t fall out of these unique specialties in Montana that we need to have,” Seger said.
Independence pledge
Seger and the organization’s board said repeatedly this week that One Sky Health will stay Montana-based, nonprofit and locally governed. “We will remain independent, locally governed across our entire health system,” Seger told NBC Montana.
That message lands in a tight market. Intermountain Health, the Utah-based system that owns St. Vincent Regional Hospital, is building a large replacement campus a few blocks north of Billings Clinic. Seger drew laughs at the announcement when he said a health system should measure its value “by the number of strong communities that are connected to it — not by the height of buildings.”
The rebrand also comes during a hard stretch for Montana hospitals. Benefis Health System in Great Falls said this month it will close a satellite clinic and end behavioral health services, citing finances. And the state’s organ transplant network faces its own federal certification questions, which we reported on Nov. 9.
One Sky Health has posted details of the change, including the facility names, at oneskyhealth.org.
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