Akron General Health System has officially joined the Cleveland Clinic.

The Clinic announced Monday, Nov. 2, that state and federal regulators had signed off on the deal. As part of the transaction, the Clinic’s system now includes Akron General’s flagship medical center, Lodi Community Hospital, the Edwin Shaw Rehabilitation Institute, its three health and wellness centers, Justin T. Rogers Hospice Care Center, Partners Physician Group and Visiting Nurse Service and Affiliates. The plan is to maintain the Akron General namesake in some capacity. The Clinic’s community hospitals — Hillcrest and Fairview, for example — kept their names once the Clinic took them over. The Clinic had been a minority investor in Akron General for a little more than a year. In late August, the health care giant announced — unsurprisingly — that it would exercise an option to take on full ownership of the Akron health system. With the addition of the Akron General enterprise, the Clinic’s annual operating revenue now hovers north of $7 billion. “This allows us directly to better serve a population we’ve been serving for a long, long time,” said Ann Huston, the Clinic’s chief strategy officer. She added, “Truthfully, in my 30 years of doing this around the country, I haven’t had an experience with a relationship that has been this productive. It’s as if we’ve known each other all our lives. Both sides, mutually, felt like we couldn’t get together soon enough.” Some of the Clinic’s immediate initiatives include breaking ground Nov. 20 on Akron General’s new emergency room — a project Huston said will cost around $43 million. Last summer, crews began demolishing the hospital’s old laundry building to make room for the new two-story, 55,000-square-foot facility that will be connected to the hospital’s primary building by a bridge. The Clinic also said it plans to open an outpatient facility in Portage County early next year and another in Lodi in 2016. The Clinic is sizing up what those facilities will look like, Huston said, but the initial plans call for leasing existing office space instead of building new facilities. Huston said there are no immediate plans for staffing changes or layoffs. Also, she said Akron General CEO Dr. Thomas “Tim” Stover is expected to remain in his role through 2017. Stover signed a three-year contract extension at the end of 2014. “We’re working right now on the integration plan,” she said. “What we aren’t going to do is rush in there and take over. We are not going to just put a bigger umbrella over our two individual heads.” For more on Akron’s changing health care landscape, read this cover story from the September print debut of Crain’s Akron Business.