St. Joseph Health Services of Rhode Island and Roger Williams Medical Center yesterday announced that they’re getting serious about a possible merger.

The two midsized hospitals, located in and near Providence, have signed a memorandum of understanding that lays out the framework for affiliation. Although nonbinding, the agreement represents the closest these hospitals have come to an agreement after a decade of intermittent talks.

The announcement comes as hospitals around the state are losing money or barely breaking even, and are looking for ways to pool resources.

The two big hospital groups, Lifespan and Care New England, plan to merge into a seven-hospital conglomerate; their application to state regulators is expected within days. Meanwhile, Landmark Medical Center, in Woonsocket, and Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island, in Pawtucket, have acknowledged that discussions about a possible affiliation are under way.

St. Joseph Health Services is affiliated with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rhode Island. It runs Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, a community hospital in North Providence, and St. Joseph Hospital for Specialty Care, which offers rehabilitation, psychiatric care and primary care in Providence. The hospital typically has about 175 inpatients at Fatima and 70 in Providence.

Roger Williams Medical Center, in Providence, is a teaching hospital affiliated with the Boston University School of Medicine. In peak times it can have as many as 170 patients.

Fatima and Roger Williams are located 2.5 miles apart, share many of the same doctors, and even use the same electronic information system. If the merger goes through, the combined system would have 3,650 employees, $350 million in annual operating revenues, and a 15-percent share of the state’s hospital marketplace.

The hospitals plan to keep separate licenses, governing boards and medical staffs, while creating a parent company with a 15-member governing board and a chief executive officer. The parent company, yet to be named, would enable the hospitals to unify back-office functions, such as purchasing, while developing ways to work together on clinical services.

Kenneth H. Belcher, president of Roger Williams, and John M. Fogarty, president of St. Joseph, emphasized that the parent would provide central management without duplicating functions. “It’s not being designed to add costs to the system,” Belcher said. “It truly is all about providing and preserving access to care for the communities we serve.”

St. Joseph would remain a Catholic hospital, displaying religious symbols, offering pastoral care and refusing to do certain procedures. Roger Williams would remain secular. But to meet the terms of Catholic canonical law, Roger Williams must agree never to perform abortions, to destroy embryos in stem cell research, or to allow euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide. Other procedures that the church opposes, such as sterilization, would be allowed at Roger Williams provided that St. Joseph derives no financial gain or loss from them.

Roger Williams would also continue to serve as a teaching site for doctors and, with the merger, may be able to expand its teaching programs.

The hospitals hope to complete a definitive agreement by September. Then their plan must undergo months of review by the Department of Health and the attorney general.

ffreyer@projo.com