Steven Serfass is an avid baseball fan.

It's no surprise then that the president of the Blue Mountain Health System's board of directors called a merger with St. Luke's University Health Network a "home run for the future of health care in Carbon County.""It's a home run for the communities we serve and it's a home run for our dedicated workforce," Serfass added.Blue Mountain had been searching for a partner for some time, but talks with St. Luke's picked up in June, according to St. Luke's President Richard A. Anderson. In a series of meetings with Blue Mountain's board, Anderson and his colleagues were asked "all the tough questions.""It was never contentious," Anderson said. "It usually takes the attorney general three to six-months to give the final OK and then it is like buying a house. You have closing and you are legally permitted to change the names and things like that. In the meantime, we can bring physician specialists in to get a running start on correcting some issues."St. Luke's has seven hospitals and more than 270 outpatient sites serving 10 counties in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Its workforce consists of 11,000 employees.Some of the first specialists patients will notice making their way to Carbon County are urologists and neurologists, Anderson said."We'd also like to look at vascular surgery," he added. "There might be some others we haven't talked about. Initially those are the three we have talked about."Blue Mountain's maternity unit shut down in 2009, but its president and chief executive officer Andrew Harris said discussions have not taken place yet as to whether that would return with the partnership.It wasn't an easy decision to go forward with the merger, but Harris said it's one that will "raise the bar for health care in the area.""Over the years as a small two-hospital system we have had difficulty recruiting specialists, common-care doctors and we have transferred a lot of patients out of Carbon County because we couldn't serve them," he said. "Now we are going to be keeping health care local. We'll be adding more specialties and services. We are really excited for the community. Health care should be taken care of locally."Blue Mountain's 1,000 employees were informed of the move Tuesday. Harris said the early reaction has been one of excitement."This guarantees their future," he said. "We'll also be able to expand. Immediately we'll fill some needs for vascular service that we previously had not been able to recruit. A group of seven vascular physicians applied for privileges today and hopefully within the next 30-45 days we'll have vascular services available. That is just one example of what we can do now."St. Luke's will not pay Blue Mountain as part of the agreement. Instead, the deal includes promises by St. Luke's that it will commit to maintain hospitals in Palmerton and Lehighton as acute-care facilities, offer employment to all BMHS employees in good standing with the system, maintain charity care policies similar to other St. Luke's hospitals, retain members of the medical staff of BMHS and assume physician employment agreements."We will learn from them and they will learn from us," Anderson said. "We will practice keeping our costs low and delivering high value. We don't lay people off just because we want to save a buck. We try to find opportunities."