Geisinger and a nearby community hospital have agreed to a $29.5 million settlement over former employees’ allegations of a no-poach agreement between the central Pennsylvania organizations.
The proposed deal was submitted for a judge’s approval Friday by the plaintiffs alongside declarations of support from the healthcare organizations. Specifically, it would have Geisinger paying $19 million and Evangelical Community Hospital—which was formerly independent but joined WellSpan Health in 2024—contributing $9.5 million.
If approved by the judge, those funds would be paid out to a class of nearly 12,000 former employees who worked at the organizations’ central Pennsylvania facilities between Jan. 1, 2014, and Aug. 5, 2020, according to court filings. Each member of the proposed settlement class would receive a minimum payment of $250 but is estimated to receive an average of $1,500 after deducting a maximum of $3.5 million for legal fees and $10,000 for the class representatives who had filed the complaint back in 2021.
Geisinger, which runs 10 hospitals and, in 2024, was acquired by Kaiser Permanente’s Risant Health, told Fierce Healthcare in an emailed statement that it disagrees with the allegations of running a no-poach agreement with Evangelical Community Hospital and that its settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing.
“This resolution allows us to focus fully on what matters most—our patients, our people and the communities we serve,” the system said in its statement. “Our employees and clinicians are the heart of our organization. We remain deeply committed to fostering a workplace where every individual is respected, supported and recognized for their contributions.”
The plaintiffs, in their 2021 complaint, said the alleged no-poach agreement had suppressed workers’ job mobility and wages. The alleged agreement was conducted “at the highest levels of their organizations, through secretive verbal exchange that were later confirmed by emails, which they agreed to conceal,” according to the complaint.
Notably, the plaintiffs wrote that the alleged agreement’s concealment “might have remained permanently hidden” if not for a Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust investigation and enjoinment of a proposed deal in which Geisinger would have partially acquired Evangelical Community Hospital.
The DOJ’s complaint in that case, filed Aug. 5, outlined a “history of coordination” that included a “concerning” no-poach agreement between senior executives and noted an instance in which the organizations’ CEOs wrote to each other with a request to stop targeted recruiting, which the DOJ said was observed. That exchange was directly referenced in the former employees’ class-action complaint.
A 2021 settlement capped Geisinger’s ownership interest in Evangelical Community Hospital at a 7.5% passive interest.
The class action’s plaintiffs and the health systems had initiated separate settlement discussions in 2023 during the case’s fact discovery, according to Friday’s filing, though these did not lead to a resolution. Discussions resumed in 2024, and, “after months of arm’s-length negotiations, plaintiffs reached separate settlement term sheets with each defendant: Evangelical on March 13, 2025 and Geisinger on March 27, 2025” with specific terms hashed out during the months to follow, according to the filing.
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