Lahey Health’s main building.

The Boston Globe reports that Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (a Harvard Medical School Teaching Hospital) and Burlington,Mass.-based Lahey Health are negotiating a possible merger to create a large health system to compete with behemoth Partners HealthCare (which includes Harvard teaching hospitals).

As The Globe notes “if the merger can be completed, it would reshape the state’s health care industry, creating a system of eight hospitals across Eastern Massachusetts that would rival the {not-for-profit} Partners network of 10 and {for-profit} Steward Health Care System’s nine.”