UCF and Florida Hospital are competing to acquire the Lake Nona facility where the Sanford Burnham Prebys research institute has been slowly shutting down over the past two years.
On Tuesday, the two institutions will make their pitches to the Orange County Commission, detailing how their plans would breathe life into the building that’s become a shadow of the robust research center it once was despite receiving $300 million from the state, county, Orlando and private sources.
The presentations, requested by Mayor Teresa Jacobs, will shine a light on negotiations that have been developing for months behind closed doors and may finally settle the future of the facility, almost two years after the California-based institute decided to leave Florida because of a lack of money required to maintain and grow the site.
The proposals share a common theme: Each organization is partnering with an outside entity to turn the 175,000-square-foot facility into a destination cancer research and treatment center.
Florida Hospital is planning to partner with the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, and establish five core programs at the facility, including translational research, drug discovery, a precision medicine research clinic, Phase 1 clinical research and a stem cell laboratory.
It’s planning to invest $100 million over 10 years; create at least 205 jobs in five years and 315 jobs in 10 years, with an average base salary of $85,000; and increase the number of research faculty members to 18 in five years and 27 in a decade. It also plans to enter negotiations with the current faculty and hire at least 50 of the current Sanford Burnham employees.
The hospital does not want to pay rent to the city and county, which own the facility, but will cover all maintenance and operational costs. It is also planning to return to the state the $11 million that’s left from its $155 million in incentive funds. If all goes as planned, the health system expects the transfer of the building and equipment on or before April 16.
“I think one of the major advantages of our proposal is that we’re ready to be in operation from day one,” said Dr. Steven Smith, senior vice president and chief scientific officer at Florida Hospital. “We’re ready to go and anxious to get started.”
UCF is bringing in three partners: Sarah Cannon Cancer Research Institute, which is Hospital Corporation of America’s cancer research division; Provision Healthcare, a network of cancer centers and developer of next-generation proton beam therapy; and Alter+Care, an Illinois-based development and investment company. The plan is to create a comprehensive cancer research and treatment center with a focus on basic and translational research, and novel therapies such as pencil beam proton therapy.
The group is proposing to lease the facility from Orange County, with UCF’s partners paying an estimated $2 million annually, although the university won’t pay rent for the space its employees would occupy. The school is also planning to return the to the state the $11 million in incentive funds.
This proposal calls for creating more than 300 high-paying jobs, with annual wages that range from $60,000 to $600,000. The school is willing to offer positions at UCF to Burnham faculty who have elected to remain in Lake Nona, based on an evaluation of their productivity and fit.
Dr. Deborah German, founding dean of the medical school, described the proposal as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” that would facilitate cancer research, education and patient care for UCF. Most major academic medical centers, she said, have cancer care facilities.
She said UCF drafted its proposal more recently than Florida Hospital because it needed partners to provide funding and resources for the project.
“We couldn’t have done it alone,” she said.
UCF presented its proposal to the school’s board of trustees Thursday, which approved it.
For either proposal to move forward, all parties – the City of Orlando, Orange County, Tavistock land development company and the state – will have to give their stamp of approval.
The 20 months since Sanford Burnham’s plans to leave Florida were revealed have been marked with bursts of surprise announcements and periods of total silence. A deal with the University of Florida, which involved UCF, fell apart shortly after its details became public in 2016. And major characters – first the institute’s trustee chair and later the institute’s CEO – have unexpectedly retired.
At one point, realizing that the institute hadn’t delivered on its promise to create 303 jobs in a decade — it has met 87 percent of its job creation goal, the institute points out — the state asked for half of its incentive money back. But the request never got anywhere beyond publicly exchanged letters between the two parties.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Economic Opportunity said Thursday the department did not have any updates.
Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute decided to open a research facility in Florida after receiving one of the largest incentive packages handed out by Florida. The state approved $155 million in incentives for operations, while Orlando, Orange County and Tavistock matched the amount by providing the land and building, bringing the total to more than $300 million.
But as the incentive funds began to dwindle, the California-based nonprofit said it could no longer sustain the operations and began to set in motion plans to leave, a decision that’s been anything but easy to execute.
And in the meantime, facing an uncertain future and with their careers in the balance, a significant number of Sanford Burnham’s faculty and staff have left.
According to Sanford Burnham’s latest scientific report ending on June 2017, 18 faculty members were still at the institute, down from the total of 27 primary faculty researchers the institute had recruited since arriving in Orlando a decade ago.
The departures began to accelerate last August, starting with Dr. Daniel Kelly, the institute’s scientific director, who’s now at the University of Pennsylvania. Since then, other faculty members have accepted jobs across the county — at University of Minnesota Medical School, Vanderbilt University and University of Texas San Antonio. Four recently signed on to join Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg and are planning to take some of their laboratory staff with them.
Sanford Burnham’s last high-profile recruit, Dr. E. Douglas Lewandowski, has also left. After just a little over two years here, he accepted a position at the Ohio State University.
Tenet Healthcare Corp. has signed a deal with the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) in New York to build an outpatient orthopedic care and surgery center near Tenet’s Good Samaritan Hospital in West Palm Beach.
Tenet’s ambulatory care services subsidiary, United Surgical Partners International, will form a joint venture with HSS, which operates a hospital in Manhattan and over a dozen of outpatient centers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. U.S. News & World Report has ranked Its hospital first in orthopedics for eight consecutive years, and third in rheumatology.
“Many Florida residents travel to HSS in New York for the highest-quality musculoskeletal care,” HSS President and CEO Louis A. Shapiro said. “We are delighted to be making that same top-quality care more convenient to communities in South Florida where quality of life is so highly prized.”
The new facility would be adjacent to Good Samaritan Hospital. Staffed by HSS physicians, it would offer diagnostic services, ambulatory surgery, rehabilitation and sports performance assistance.
“Being able to leverage the knowledge and expertise at HSS in the care of orthopedic and musculoskeletal conditions will enable us to create a new center of excellence for our patients,” Tenet Executive Chairman and CEO Ron Rittenmeyer said.
Tenet declined to say how large the facility would be or when it would break ground.
In 2015, Tenet filed plans with West Palm Beach to expand Good Samaritan, at 1309 N. Flagler Drive, by 64,982 square feet.
In 2016, Good Samaritan earned $11.9 million on revenue of $178.6 million, according to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration. It had a bed occupancy rate of 37 percent – one of the lowest among South Florida hospitals.
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As Baby Boomers age—10,000 Americans will turn 65 every day for the next 20 years—the total demand for inpatient care will witness enormous growth. With the number of mental health patients on the rise, micro-hospitals are steadily evolving into consumer-friendly environments, taking their cue from the hospitality industry.
In addition, architects are prone to further incorporate digital technologies into how both patients and employees interact with and within medical spaces. So what features should health-care designers watch out for in 2018? Architect Jason Carney, partner at Environments for Health Architecture, shared his views with Commercial Property Executive, highlighting the industry’s top trends for 2018.
What are the major trends impacting the health-care industry today?
Carney: The trend of health care as a commodity continues in many different markets across the country. It’s driving the tailored placement of core services at convenient locations and in the design of consumer-friendly spaces that draw from the hospitality industry to attract patients. In these cases, market competition is driving providers to focus on building the “right” styles of facilities, with the “right” services, in the “right” places to attract patients, many of whom are increasingly making health-care provider decisions based on how close a facility is to mass transit, a highway off-ramp or a shopping center. Technological innovation and medical breakthroughs are accelerating changes in the way care is delivered and spaces are configured.
It certainly seems that industry leaders are moving away from developing inpatient structures, while micro-hospitals are growing more popular. How does your vision fit in this general framework?
Carney: Long-term success of micro-hospitals requires flexibility. As growth occurs or markets change, micro-hospitals need to be able to adapt. It is important to understand the core medical services that are needed in each market to sustain a micro-hospital and how that facility may grow and adapt over time as the market changes.
How can outdated health-care facilities be upgraded and adapted to the needs of patients and staff in 2018?
Carney: Space within an existing hospital campus comes at a premium and must be thoughtfully designed to provide an optimal experience, utilization and return on investment. In some cases, the best choice is to remove outdated buildings and provide for replacement within the existing campus structure.
One version we are seeing is the creation of the “hospital within a hospital”—essentially, a specialty hospital sited within the existing or reconfigured shell of a larger “host” hospital. These can include maternity hospitals, heart-focused hospitals or other specialty hospitals that sit inside a larger medical center. And whether it’s expanding access to telehealth or creating spaces, where appropriate, that feel more like extended-stay hotels than inpatient hospitals, opportunities abound to reconfigure existing hospital spaces to better serve patients.
How can large-hospital services be integrated into smaller, off-campus facilities?
Carney: One leading solution we see health-care providers opting for is “micro-hospitals,” which are typically 15,000 to 50,000 square feet in size, open 24/7 and providing five to 15 inpatient beds for observation and short-stay use. Micro-hospitals are an affordable, effective way to provide a large variety of big-hospital services in the community, including surgery, radiology, emergency departments and related services.
At least 19 states now have at least one micro-hospital and many more are coming. Now that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have authorized micro-hospitals that have dedicated emergency departments as being eligible for both 340B discounted drug pricing and the Outpatient Prospective Payment System, we expect micro-hospitals will prove increasingly popular with providers and patients alike.
How can new design features offer better solutions to efficiently accommodate cognitively impaired patients as opposed to older construction types?
Carney: Between the impacts of the national opioid abuse crisis and the rising awareness of mental health conditions, we’re seeing more and more hospitals–such as Connecticut’s Waterbury Hospital and Newport Hospital in Rhode Island–reconfigure their emergency departments (ED) to accommodate cognitively impaired patients more effectively and more sensitively. A big part of this is simply creating spaces for cognitively impaired people that are thoughtfully segregated from areas serving trauma victims or cardiac arrest patients, places where they can receive a behavioral health or addiction management intervention with compassion and dignity.
Spatial arrangements and interior design elements that improve a patient’s understanding and awareness of their environment while working to reduce anxiety are important components of this design. Also, because patients with cognitive impairment and behavioral issues often require longer stays than the general ED population, a definite emerging best design practice is adding features for them such as bathroom showers, places to securely store belongings and access to decompression space.
What can the health-care industry learn from the hospitality sector in terms of design trends?
Carney: We see many hospitals embracing the trend of removing outpatient services from traditional, larger hospitals and moving them into more consumer-friendly, hospitality-influenced environments, like new medical buildings near shopping malls or transportation nodes. These aren’t just spaces that feel more hospitality than hospital—they create operational efficiencies, improve clinical outcomes and reduce readmission rates. There’s also a growing recognition that larger parts of the inpatient hospital experience can be accommodated in less hospital-like environments, which patients prefer.
Could you give us an example of such a project?
Carney: A great example is E4H’s recent work with a New York hospital to create a long-term space for immunocompromised patients going through a procedure such as a bone-marrow transplant (BMT). The first phase of a BMT—surgery and initial recuperation—obviously must take place in an inpatient hospital setting. But in later phases, when patients are recovering and need mainly to be monitored closely for infections or complications, they don’t require a standard inpatient hospital room and can enjoy a much better, less costly experience in a specially designed, hotel-like space.
For our client, we created a space for this “in-between” population that has private, suite-style rooms; specialized water filtration systems to protect immune-suppressed patients; and more of a hotel aesthetic. Patients are served by a concierge instead of a charge-desk nurse. If any of them develop complications, of course, they are quickly detected and patients can rapidly be brought back into the hospital for treatment. But if their recovery proceeds without incident, they can enjoy the equivalent of a long-term hotel stay, instead of long-term hospitalization, after their BMT.
How will telehealth affect the industry in 2018?
Carney: Numbers we’ve seen from the health-care consulting firm Sg2 project that just in the next two years, the volume of virtual health-care patients will rise 7 percent and in-home health-care services will rise 13 percent. Ever-more-sophisticated patient monitors and ever-more-robust communications platforms are allowing more and more patients to enjoy telehealth consults with physicians and care-team professionals. Increasingly, we see telehealth being used to consult with specialists like dermatologists, radiologists, psychiatrists and others without patients having to schedule a second appointment or hospital visit.
How does it impact the actual design of a facility?
Carney: Telehealth is absolutely continuing to grow, and health-care facilities need to be thinking about how to incorporate more of it in their master facility plans. That can mean everything from configuring treatment rooms to accommodate remote consultation and providing infrastructure for broadband video links to heightened attention to the lighting, aesthetics and privacy of rooms in which telehealth consultations will occur.
Telehealth technology is also transforming lobbies, common spaces and admissions areas. Increasingly, these areas are being designed to include accessible areas for kiosks or tablets from which patients can register, view their records or videoconference with a provider. As telehealth continues to expand, we will see changes to staffing models and reduction of provider support space at care locations.
What about augmented reality?
Carney: As we look even further into the future, the use of augmented reality will change the way that patients interact with providers and how providers collaborate, research and plan their delivery of care.
What can we expect beyond 2018 in terms of trends and challenges in health care?
Carney: Pressures to manage costs, accommodate continued medical and technological breakthroughs and meet the preferences and desires of health-care consumers and practitioners will only grow. New developments in approaches such as gene therapy and bioprinting will drive a greater need for specialized laboratory functions as a component of treatment. Further miniaturization of robotic systems will mean changes in surgery and the way that operating rooms are configured, with a growing emphasis on support for technology-assisted procedures.
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Nicklaus Children’s Hospital just paid $88 million for the Miami Medical Center campus near Miami International Airport, property records show.
HC 5959 NW 7th Street LLC, an affiliate of the Carter Validus Mission Critical REIT, sold the property at 5959 Northwest Seventh Street to Variety Children’s Hospital, an entity of Nicklaus Children’s Hospital.
The deal included a 6,336-square-foot office building, a 5.15-acre parking lot and four single-family homes just south of the hospital. Nicklaus will keep the facility closed until it determines plans for the hospital campus, according to a spokesperson.
A for-profit investment arm of Nicklaus, Children’s Health Ventures, was a minority investor in Miami Medical Center. Additional investors included Nueterra, a health care management company based in Kansas.
Records show Tampa-based Carter Validus paid nearly $47 million for the property in 2014. Despite some major renovations, the hospital closed its doors in October. It had been seeking capital and was even considering a sale prior to shutting down, according to published reports.
The hospital included 67 private rooms and 12 operating rooms. It was founded in 1963 by exiled Cuban doctors, and was formerly known as Pan American Hospital.
UF Health North nearly doubled the size of its campus with the opening of its new 168,000-square-foot bed tower last May. The latest addition to the North Jacksonville medical campus on Max Leggett Parkway, just a few miles from Jacksonville International Airport, is the 92-bed hospital with all-private patient rooms on four floors of the fivestory building.
The second floor has 20 beds for women’s services, including 12 large delivery suites that serve as the location for labor, delivery, recovery and postpartum care — allowing mothers, babies and loved ones to stay in one room until discharge. A 24-bed intensive care unit is located on the third floor, and the fourth and fifth floors each have 24 medical and surgical suites.
The $85 million expansion, along with the existing medical office complex, provides residents in Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia greater access to much-needed health care services.
“The success of UF Health North and the enthusiasm that the community has shown have exceeded even our highest expectations,” said Leon L. Haley Jr., MD, MHSA, CPE, FACEP, chief executive officer of UF Health Jacksonville and dean of the UF College of Medicine – Jacksonville. “We knew that this rapidly growing area of Jacksonville needed a health care facility of its own, a place that offers the very best possible medical care, and we’re incredibly proud of the way we have been accepted.”
UF Health North opened its medical office building in February 2015. The six-story building includes a full-service 24/7 emergency room, outpatient surgery suites, imaging and other diagnostic services, a midwife-led birth center and four floors of physician offices. The operation has already earned a 5-star rating for patient satisfaction in emergency room and outpatient surgery care by Professional Research Consultants, a national health care research group.
“It’s not just our physicians and other medical providers who make this campus special. It’s the incredible attitude and compassion that everyone who works here brings every day, recognizing that patients are at the heart of everything we do,” said Wayne Marshall, vice president of UF Health North. “This is an incredible resource. I couldn’t be more excited for this community and for the future of our organization.”
University of Florida Health Science Center’s Jacksonville Campus
Just north of Downtown Jacksonville lies the regional campus of the University of Florida — the UF Health Science Center Jacksonville. Its facilities intertwined within UF Health Jacksonville’s hospital and outpatient buildings, the Health Science Center includes the UF colleges of Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy. Similar to its sibling campus in Gainesville, the Health Science Center in Jacksonville also includes a full UF library, dedicated clinical research facilities and a medical simulation laboratory.
About 450 faculty members and 16 clinical departments comprise the UF College of Medicine – Jacksonville. More than 370 UF medical residents and fellows train in Jacksonville in one of 44 medical specialty or subspecialty programs. Residencies and fellowships are the final stages of a physician’s training before going into practice.
In addition, third- and fourth-year medical students from UF’s main campus in Gainesville complete rotations at UF Health facilities in Jacksonville. Under the supervision of a physician, this allows medical students to have hands-on training in the fundamentals of patient care through multiple medical specialties, helping students select their future fields of practice.
RESEARCH
In addition to patient care and education, research is the third pillar of academic medicine. Physicians and residents at the UF Health Science Center Jacksonville have completed more than 550 clinical research studies, with community-based, patient-centered projects often a major focus. The campus received $21.5 million in research funding in 2016, with 72 percent of that money from federal sources like the National Institutes of Health. Over the past four years, total external funding has increased by 40 percent.
COLLEGE OF NURSING
The Jacksonville campus of the UF College of Nursing offers an accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing for people who already hold a bachelor’s degree in another field. While the college has Jacksonville faculty, it also employs modern communications technology to offer interactive teleconferenced seminars from the Gainesville campus. Differentiating the college from other nursing schools in the area, UF nursing students regularly work alongside pharmacy students and medical residents in simulation scenarios aimed at optimizing patient outcomes by improving communication and interprofessional teamwork skills.
COLLEGE OF PHARMACY
The UF College of Pharmacy is ranked as the No. 1 pharmacy college in the state by U.S. News & World Report. The college features preeminent researchers who are leading major medical breakthroughs in areas such as drug discovery and development, pharmacometrics and systems pharmacology, and precision medicine.
In 2017, the college welcomed 271 students into the professional PharmD program. Of that group, 51 enrolled at the Jacksonville campus. Students enjoy small class sizes that allow them to build quality relationships with professors and classmates, as well as take advantage of leadership opportunities.
“We are fortunate to have renowned faculty physicians and research experts among the hundreds of dedicated personnel on our campus,” said Leon L. Haley Jr., MD, MHSA, CPE, FACEP, dean of the UF College of Medicine – Jacksonville. “While providing exceptional patient care and forging new discovery, they help ensure our trainees and students receive all the support and resources they need and ultimately have an educational experience that is second to none.”
/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/florida-medical-space-logo.png00ADMIN/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/florida-medical-space-logo.pngADMIN2018-01-08 02:26:012018-01-08 02:26:01University Of Florida Health Continues Expansion Into Northeast Florida
