PROVIDENCE – State officials have begun poring over the massive merger application filed by Lifespan Corp. and Care New England Health System after the two nonprofit providers finished filing it earlier this week.

Mike Healey, a spokesman for Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch, said staff members in his office and at the Department of Health are now engaged in the first part of the multistep review process: going through the merger application to make sure it is complete.

“We’re not looking at it from the perspective of merit” at this point, but rather completeness, Healey said. Decisions from the two offices are expected by mid-November.

Lifespan and Care New England, which operate seven hospitals along with affiliated research, clinical and educational programs, had filed most of the nearly 110,000-page merger application by early July, nearly two years after they first announced plans to combine operations. A previous application lapsed after state officials and the two organizations failed to agree on whether it was, in fact, complete.

If state officials once again declare the application to be incomplete, Lifespan and Care New England will have a limited time to provide whatever additional information is requested.

If, on the other hand, state officials accept the merger application, the two offices will move on to the next step: scheduling public hearings to get input on the proposal from other stakeholders, which is “a very long list,” Healey said.

Once those hearings are finished, the attorney general’s office and the health department will have six months to review the application to decide whether to allow the merger, meaning it is possible a final decision on the merger could come by the middle of next year.

Healey said the questions state officials will ask questions include: “Does this make sense to all the various constituencies who would be affected? Is it good for Rhode Island? Does it ensure access to health care for as many people as possible?”

“It’s all those kinds of substantive public policy questions that you need to answer,” he said.

The merger could be either approved, rejected, or approved with conditions that would need to be satisfied for it to go through, Healey said.

The process for reviewing a hospital merger is outlined in the state’s Hospital Conversions Act. A merger application by two smaller organizations, St. Joseph Health Services and Roger Williams Medical Center, has been accepted and is currently being reviewed.