Baptist Health South Florida and Boca Raton Regional Hospital announced that they have reached an agreement on a formal Letter of Intent regarding a strategic partnership between the respective organizations. This development marks an important step forward in structuring an agreement that would finalize the affiliation.

“We are most pleased to have achieved this milestone in our discussions with such a prestigious and high-quality healthcare organization,” said Jerry Fedele, President and CEO of Boca Raton Regional Hospital. “It is an exciting development for our Hospital and our community and reflects the hard work and thoughtful interactions of our Ad Hoc Partnership Steering Committee, our Board and Baptist Health leadership.”

Baptist Health is the largest not-for-profit healthcare organization in the region with 10 hospitals and more than 100 physician and outpatient locations from Palm Beach County to the Florida Keys.

“Like Baptist Health, Boca Raton Regional Hospital is a top-ranked organization with a not-for-profit mission and commitment to providing high-quality compassionate care. We are confident that the synergies between our organizations will allow us to better serve our communities and increase access to affordable, high quality care for our patients,” said Brian E. Keeley, President and CEO of Baptist Health.

A Letter of Intent essentially serves as an “agreement to agree” between two parties, clarifies key points in the relationship and is considered as an announcement that the two entities are moving forward in reaching a Definitive Agreement. It is expected that a Definitive Agreement between Boca Raton Regional Hospital and Baptist Health will be executed by early 2019 and the affiliation is expected to be finalized by summer.

Boca Raton Regional Hospital first announced its intent to seek a strategic partner in 2017. Given the growing demand for its services, along with the Hospital’s programmatic and facility expansion and financial performance, it was thought to be an opportune time to seek a partner that would help it sustain and build upon its commitment to accessible, affordable and high-quality care delivery throughout the region. “Our goal was to use our success in recent years to attract other providers and establish a partnership that would enhance our capabilities and mitigate the challenges of a stand-alone hospital in a complex and evolving healthcare industry,” said Fedele.

After issuing a Request for Proposal and receiving responses from some of the nation’s foremost healthcare systems, Boca Regional narrowed its list of suitors to five in the spring of 2018 and then selected Baptist Heath South Florida for further discussions.

“We have now advanced closer to a most important evolution for our Hospital, one that will accelerate and elevate our position as a preeminent academic regional referral medical center,” said Christine E. Lynn, Boca Raton Regional Hospital Board Chair. “It will serve to secure both our goals and objectives and those of Baptist Health South Florida.”

Sanford Burnham’s greatest legacy in Orlando may be the beautifully designed building that’s perched in Lake Nona’s medical city, a stone’s throw from the UCF College of Medicine.

UCF officially took over the 175,000-square-foot facility on December 2 to turn it into a cancer research and treatment facility, closing the book on the research institute’s Florida campus.

In the vast empty spaces of the airy, sunlit building, all Dean Deborah German sees is opportunity — even in a seemingly boring conference room.

“Imagine this as a cancer center. Imagine that we have a cancer symposium coming from all over the community or all over the world,” German said in a recent tour. Let’s imagine that we have a support group for people with a particular type of cancer and we want to hold meetings. Maybe we want them to come for breakfast and we want them to get to know each other. For education, if we have post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, medical students, residents, imagine them all in here talking about the latest in basic research and how that moves all the way to the bedside,” German said.

There will soon be a hospital next door — UCF’s teaching hospital that just broke ground — and this building’s auditorium will make a perfect space for grand rounds.

“I’m grateful to SBP people who built this building because they had a lot of resources and they could build a space like this. … Part of our job is that this is vibrant and this is used all the time,” German said.

She walked through the first-floor cafe area that’s surrounded by windows and greenery. Yet another opportunity for holding conferences. Or maybe students can come over from across the street and study there.

“I can imagine benches out there,” she said pointing at the spaces between the trees. And then, as she walked past the small dining tables, she asked the facilities’ director who was walking along with her to remove the bright artificial flowers that sat in small vases.

“I like flowers. I think these are just … Throw them away in place of your choosing,” she said.

On that November day, only a few people working with Sanford Burnham were left in the building. The one faculty member who was still there had pasted a piece of paper on his office nameplate with his new title at the institution he was moving to.

Most of the equipment was gone.

Some had already followed the researchers who left to destinations like Florida Hospital, Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital and the University of Florida. Equipment that was purchased with local money has remained in the facility, including furniture and some lab equipment.

“Some hi-tech equipment was transferred to UCF and additional general research equipment will remain in the building to be used by UCF,” wrote the institute’s spokeswoman Deborah Robison in an email.

One of the building’s crown jewels, the sophisticated drug discovery robotic platform that made up the Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics, was transferred — not sold, Sanford Burnham officials said — to Discovery Cure Institute, a newly formed nonprofit research institute in Alachua. The company “is focused on finding new treatments for cancer and infectious diseases using its ultra-high-throughput screening and medicinal chemistry capabilities,” according to the forms filed with the state.

Discovery Cure also recruited members of the Sanford Burnham’s drug discovery team, said Robison in the email.

Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute came to Florida a decade ago with more than $150 million in state incentives and matching funds from Orlando, Orange County and Tavistock. In return, it agreed to create more than 300 jobs in 10 years.

Then, about three years ago, the nonprofit research institute, headquartered in La Jolla, Calif., began planning its departure from Orlando.

It decided to leave because it found the operations to be financially unsustainable, its officials said. The incentive money was running out and the federal funding wasn’t keeping up with the institute’s projections a decade ago, they said.

By then the institute had reached about 87 percent of jobs it had promised and it couldn’t break its contract and leave.

So it first tried to hand off operations to the University of Florida. But that deal fell through. Then it tried to strike a deal with Florida Hospital; that deal also fell through earlier this year.

Eventually, UCF’s proposal won the approval of the stakeholders.

Before the agreements were final, Sanford Burnham owned the building. Orange County currently owns the land.

The institute gave the building to the county for free. In turn, the county will sell the land and building for $50 million to UCF.

UCF, through one of its Direct Support Organizations, will pay the mortgage, without interest, to the county quarterly once it starts receiving rent payments from the building’s tenants, for 30 years.

Orange County will then distribute the money among the funding parties, 43 percent of which will go to the county, 35 percent to the City of Orlando and the rest to Tavistock.

German is planning to fill the building with clinicians and scientists in the next two years. Its name is now official: UCF Lake Nona Cancer Center.

“When I came to UCF, everyone said UCF: it stands for U Can’t Finish and Under Construction Forever. And I didn’t really like either one of those, so I decided that for me personally, UCF is going to stand for U Can’t Fail,” she said.

The university wants to turn the facility into a cancer research and treatment facility with several private partners, including HCA’s Sarah Cannon cancer institute and Provision Healthcare, which specializes in proton therapy.

“And there are other partners but they still don’t want to be named yet,” said German, as she walked the hallways of the building.

Dr. Annette Khaled, a professor and the head of the cancer division at UCF Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences, may be among the first occupants of the building,

“It’s a beautiful design of lab space. It really allows us not just to be in our individual world, but the opposite,” said Khaled, standing on the third floor of the building, where faculty offices sit across from their glass-shielded labs. “Students will be here. Labs will be here. And on the floors below, you’ll have patients and doctors and you have space to meet them. It’s super significant.”

But before all that, German is planning to bring the building back life. She’s hosting a Christmas party there.

“Wouldn’t you? Since the building is completely empty, I don’t want the building to feel lonely like it’s abandoned. [The building] comes with holiday decorations, so let’s start right away,” she said.

Source: Orlando Sentinel

“As patient preferences shift toward cost or value, providers are adjusting their services to meet this demand.” That is according to Trisha Talbot, a managing director in the Phoenix office of Newmark Knight Frank.

Talbot, a speaker at the RealShare Healthcare conference in Arizona on December 5th and 6th, says that she is seeing everything from practices that serve the high volume, low income patient-base to those with employer-based insurance to the other end of the spectrum where they offer concierge medicine.

When asked about trends in the sector, she said that the trend for a practice to be located near a serving hospital is consistent.

“Providers seeking retail locations is a trend I see continuing in the New Year. Adaptive reuse of retail space that has gone dark, developing retail pad sites and/or absorbing in-line retail spaces have all become popular. Retail offers providers to offer its patients visibility, parking and convenience next to other amenities.”

She explains that acute care hospitals and outpatient care will always be required.

“There are patients that require a lot of healthcare services and patients that do not. If a patient uses a lot of healthcare services, most likely cost-effective and convenient access to services will be important. If a patient only needs an annual check-up and urgent care services for the occasion flu, their concerns are different. Healthcare practices to serve both needs and those in between are required. The challenge is how practices are deciding what to offer and what demographic they want to serve.”

Source: GlobeSt.

South Miami Medical Arts Building – Estate Investments Group | $5.8M

Estate Investments Group purchased the South Miami Medical Arts building in South Miami for $5.8 million.

The 21,455-square-foot property at 6201 Southwest 70th Street traded hands for about $270 per square foot. The seller, 6201 of Miami LLC, is tied to the construction engineering company Munilla Construction Management.

The four-story building was completed in 1972, records show.

5297 West Copans Road – Centers Health Care | $5.5M

Centers Health Care bought a nearly 33,000-square-foot, single-story office building with lake views in Margate for $5.5 million.

The seller, Northwest Broward Development LLC, is led by attorney Leigh Katzman. The property at 5297 Copans Road previously sold for $3.2 million in 2010.

Sunrise Medical Park – Marc Gordon | $5M

Sunrise Medical Park, a medical office complex consisting of five, one-story buildings, sold for $5 million to Flamingo Medical Office LLC, led by Marc Gordon.

The seller is a company tied to Levy Realty Advisors. The property at 8391-8399 West Oakland Park Boulevard last sold for $3.2 million in 2011. Tenants include Holy Cross and Tenet Hospital Groups.

 

Source:  The Real Deal

Boca Raton-based Promise Healthcare Group LLC, a hospital and nursing home chain, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.

In a petition filed with a Delaware bankruptcy court on Nov. 5, the company said it had debt exceeding $565 million, plus accrued and unpaid interest of $110 million, accrued expenses and accounts payable of about $94 million, and capitalized leases of about $13 million.

According to the petition, the company has hired FTI Consulting Inc. to assist in “evaluating strategic and financial alternatives to improve liquidity” and appointed FTI’s senior managing director for corporate finance and restructuring, Andrew Hinkelman, as chief restructuring officer and interim chief financial officer.

Under Chapter 11 bankruptcy, a company’s debtor remains in control of the reorganizing business as it seeks restructuring and new financing.

A statement by Hinkelman to the court said Promise Healthcare, with 4,466 employees, operates 16 acute care hospitals and two skilled nursing facilities across nine states. In Florida, Promise Healthcare operates hospitals in Miami, Fort Myers and The Villages.

“While I believe that the Debtors’ overall business is fundamentally strong, the Debtors have been operating with an unsustainable balance sheet due to current industry dynamics and certain underperforming facilities within the Debtors’ portfolio,” the statement said.

The filing seeks approval of $85 million in post-bankruptcy financing from Wells Fargo Bank, which would keep the company and its properties in operation during the restructuring process.

During the bankruptcy, the company intends to sell off two of its hospitals, in Los Angeles and St. Louis, Mo., as well as real estate in San Diego, while it negotiates sale or restructuring of its remaining assets, Hinkelman’s statement says. He added that the company intends to exit the bankruptcy in six months.

According to a 2017 Sun Sentinel story, the company was founded in 2003 by Peter Baronoff, a former Boca Raton City Council member, with the goal of offering superior care for seriously ill patients. Baronoff won the Sun Sentinel Co.’s 2016 Excalibur Award for Business Leader of the Year in Palm Beach County. He resigned as the company’s CEO early this year and resigned from the board of directors in May, Hinkelman’s statement said.

Richard Gold, the company’s president and chief operating officer, resigned in July.

While net revenue increased from $489.5 million in 2015 to $512.2 million in 2016, it declined to $462.5 million in 2017 as the company reported an operating loss of $25.2 million.

Factors contributing to the bankruptcy included sharp decreases in Medicare reimbursement rates for patient stays in 2015 and 2016, the filing states, as well as “significant” investments in new business projects that have since been abandoned.

Source: SunSentinel