Baptist Health South Florida and Virginia-based Interstate Hotels held a grand opening for the new Hilton Miami Dadeland, a hotel with amenities for healthy living.

The 184-room property at 9100 N. Kendall Drive in Miami includes fitness equipment in each room, a meditation garden, on-site walking and jogging trails; and a farm-to-table restaurant. Thirty-four of its rooms are designated for extended stays.

“Early on, we knew we wanted to introduce a unique product to the market that would serve a variety of needs,” said Ana Lopez- Blazquez, chief strategy and transformation officer for Baptist Health. “Hilton embraced our vision of a multipurpose hotel, with rooms equipped for extended stays, and our desire to incorporate wellness into the design of the guest rooms and amenities.”

Coral Gables-based CallisonRTKL designed the hotel. It has 10,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor meeting space and a 6,250-square-foot ballroom with a private outdoor area.

The hotel’s restaurant is Table 55, led by Executive Chef Andrew Edwards. Its menu includes ingredients sourced from local farms and the hotel’s on-site garden.

James Shandor is the general manager. Room rates start at $149 a night.

Hilton Miami Dadeland broke ground in December 2016 after Baptist Health and Hilton Worldwide announced their partnership in August that year. The property complements the patient offerings at Miami Cancer Institute.

South Florida is ripe to capture a share of the growing worldwide medical tourism market. The trend is valued at $50 billion globally.

Source: SFBJ

Edward Jimenez decided to pursue a career in health care management to help find a cure for his father’s Parkinson’s disease.

What once seemed like a nearly impossible goal is now becoming a reality, Jimenez said.

On Friday, Jimenez, the CEO of UF Health Shands Hospital, announced Shands will receive $40 million to start the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases, at 3007 SW Wilson Road. The new center will treat patients and find cures for neurologic disorders.

The center will open in July, Jimenez said.

About 150 medical researchers, professors and students gathered Friday in front of what will soon become the institute. Jimenez said Lee Fixel, a partner with the investment firm Tiger Global Management, donated $20 million to the creation of the project. UF will match the donation, which will make the total contribution $40 million.

Lee, Jimenez and Shands doctors have been planning the project for more than 20 years, Jimenez said. Lee said he donated to the project to give it the financial boost it needs to succeed.

Fixel previously invested in Facebook, LinkedIn, Eventbrite and Souq, an e-commerce marketplace run by Amazon.

“Lee is helping what is already great become greater,” Jimenez said. “He has a family and a job, but he still puts helping others first as well.”

The project hopes to raise another $60 million to continue hiring well-known researchers and their teams, Jimenez said. The current $40 million will help continue the building’s construction, which began in November, and allow the institute to recruit five top researchers across the country to begin seeking treatments.

After meeting Fixel two decades ago, Jimenez said the two came up with the idea to start an institute at UF to search for treatments for Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, also known as ALS, and other neurological conditions.

“The ability to bring together some of the best minds in medicine can make an exponential impact,” Fixel said.

Florida is arguably hit the hardest by cognitive disorders due to it being the third most populous state with an aging demographic, said Kelly Foote, a UF neurology professor and co-director of the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases.

The Normal Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases will be able to find a cure for the millions who are diagnosed, Foote said.

“We are looking for the smartest and are trying to identify five researchers that are willing to come,” Foote said. “But most importantly, willing to make a lasting impact in the lives of others.”

Source: Alligator.org

While the Republican-controlled House is taking aim again at Florida’s certificate-of-need laws, a top state official testified this week that many new hospitals are going through the existing regulatory process with little problem.

Florida is one of 35 states that have laws designed to require health-care providers to justify the need for certain types of new facilities and services. Some GOP lawmakers, including House Speaker Jose Oliva, R-Miami Lakes, have argued that such regulations unnecessarily drive up the cost of health care by artificially restricting the market and maintain that the state should take more of a “free market” approach to health care.

Molly McKinstry, a deputy secretary for the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, told House members that in recent years most new hospitals have gone through the state’s current process without getting bogged down in regulatory fights. Those fights, which often include a hearing before an administrative law judge, can drag out for one to two years.

McKinstry said 25 acute-care hospitals received initial approvals over the past seven years. Of those 25 hospitals, 13 were approved without competitors challenging the certificates of need backed by regulators. Nine other hospitals were ultimately approved, and only three did not receive the final go-ahead.

Florida has scaled back its certificate-of-need laws several times over the last two decades. Rep. Cary Pigman, an Avon Park Republican who chairs the House Health Market Reform Subcommittee, told members of his panel that they can expect another CON rollback proposal during the 2019 session, which starts March 5.

While Oliva has sounded off on what he calls the “hospital industrial complex,” his counterpart, Senate President Bill Galvano, R-Bradenton, has been more cautious, urging against complete deregulation of the health care market.

House leaders in recent years have repeatedly called for eliminating or scaling back certificate-of-need laws, which also apply to such thing as building nursing homes. The effort also had support from former Gov. Rick Scott but ran into objections in the Senate.

The issue has divided the hospital industry in the past, with some hospitals favoring changes in the CON process and others opposed. Also, the Florida Health Care Association, a major lobbying group for the nursing-home industry, has made maintaining the CON process for nursing homes a priority for the 2019 session, according to information posted on its website.

McKinstry’s hospital figures didn’t include the last round of CON preliminary approvals that were announced in December. In an unusual move, the Agency for Health Care Administration approved eight CON applications for new hospitals, The state approved two new hospitals in Miami Dade County, a 100-bed acute care facility planned by the Public Health Trust of Miami Dade — which operates the Jackson Health System — and an 80-bed facility planned by a subsidiary of its competitor, the Hospital Corporation of America.

The agency also approved competing CON applications for new hospitals in Seminole and Orange counties.

Source: News4Jax

Orlando Health plans to build a pair of facilities on its downtown campus.

The $3.4 billion nonprofit health care provider announced plans for a one-story, 6,800-square-foot new Orlando Health Imaging Center at 1800 S. Orange Ave. The center would provide medical imaging services such as MRI and CT scans. Orlando Health didn’t provide construction cost estimates, but it may cost roughly $2 million to build, according to industry standards.

“We’re excited about bringing this new flagship imaging center to the heart of the Downtown South district on Orange Avenue,” Matt Taylor, vice president of asset strategy for Orlando Health, said in a prepared statement. “In addition to serving patients with the most technologically-advanced equipment in a welcoming setting, we are providing convenient patient parking adjacent the building. The new location offers patients easy access to imaging services near their work or home.”

The other facility, which will be built on 121 W. Copeland Drive between Sligh Boulevard and Lucerne Terrace, includes a nine-level, 895-space parking garage for staff and patients, which could be as large as 161,000 square feet. The structure, which could cost up to $25 million according to industry standards, also will include more than 12,000 square feet of medical office space on the ground level, plus an attached five-level, 42,000-square-foot medical office building.

Orlando Health previously closed on the Copeland property on June 18 for $833,500. The land was previously owned by the city of Orlando/Orlando Utilities Commission.

Orlando Health has submitted plans for both projects to the city of Orlando and is seeking approval to begin construction. Construction on the imaging center is expected to begin this spring, with completion by fall 2019. The Copeland Drive building is planned to begin spring 2019, with completion expected for nine months later.

The development team for the imaging center includes Nashville, Tenn.-based architect Gresham Smith & Partners along with Titusville-based general contractor Rush Construction Inc., while Apopka-based Finfrock is the design/build firm for the parking garage and office building, Taylor told Orlando Business Journal. All Orlando Health positions at the two facilities will be filled by current employees, and the projects are expected to add 100 total construction jobs.

Rush Construction could not be reached for comment. Finfrock decline to comment on the construction price, citing confidentiality.

Orlando Health’s eight Central Florida hospitals have a total of 3,300-plus beds. It has the area’s only Level One Trauma Centers for adults and children, and is a teaching hospital system. Its hospitals are: Orlando Regional Medical Center, Dr. P. Phillips Hospital, South Seminole Hospital, Health Central Hospital, the Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children, Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women & Babies, South Lake Hospital and St. Cloud Regional Medical Center. It also owns 11 urgent care centers in the region, as well as several cancer centers, freestanding ERs and more. It is one of the region’s largest employers, with 23,000 workers.

Source: OBJ

AdventHealth plans to build a freestanding emergency room with a helipad in southeast Orlando’s Lake Nona community
The 18,488-square-foot facility will be built on 6.54 vacant acres at 10093 Lake Nona Blvd., which is west of Narcoossee Road, south of Lake Nona Boulevard and north of State Road 417, according to a draft agenda for the Feb. 14 meeting of the Southeast Town Design Review Committee. The project, owned by Adventist Health System/Sunbelt Inc., is seeking approval as a standalone emergency room.
The new facility is part of a growing trend in the area to build more freestanding emergency centers. Freestanding emergency centers typically are owned and operated by licensed hospitals. The facilities are not connected to a main hospital campus but offer the same comprehensive 24/7 emergency services. The number of such facilities is on the rise in Florida, in part due to overcrowded ERs, and partly due to a desire to grow hospital system revenue. Hospital systems eventually may also expand them into full hospitals if they can prove the need for a facility. For example, HCA Healthcare Inc.’s Oviedo ER, built in 2013, became a $109 million, 64-bed hospital called Oviedo Medical Center in 2017.
The state had only 26 freestanding ERs in 2016 and that number has grown to 41, according to the Florida Agency For Health Care Administration. The total count will rise to 50-plus with the Central Florida projects in the works and may go even higher, since they fulfill a strategy for hospital systems to grow revenue by bringing emergency care closer to outlying, typically affluent suburbs, where people are more likely to be able to afford health care.
This is the sixth such facility AdventHealth has in the works or already has built.
AdventHealth broke ground on another freestanding ER in Oviedo last November. The Orlando-based nonprofit health care provider will open the 19,000-square-foot AdventHealth Oviedo ER by fall 2019. The facility at 8100 Red Bug Lake Road will include two kid-friendly patient rooms, imaging technology like X-ray, CT scan and ultrasound equipment, as well as a medical laboratory.
AdventHealth, which also has freestanding ERs in Lake Mary and Winter Garden, plans to build a $12 million, 14,000-square-foot freestanding ER in Deltona as well as a $15.6 million, 19,000-square-foot freestanding ER in Waterford Lakes that’s expected to open in second-quarter 2019 and have 300 temporary construction jobs and 100 permanent medical jobs at full buildout.
Its $65 million, 97,000-square-foot freestanding ER in Winter Garden opened in February 2016. That outpatient facility, which broke ground in 2013, brought 269 new jobs to the area, $14 million in additional annual payroll and a $23 million boost to Orange County’s gross domestic product, Winter Garden City Commissioner Colin Sharman previously told OBJ.
Meanwhile, AdventHealth system’s Altamonte Springs-based parent company Adventist Health System bought roughly 15 acres on the north and south sides of Lake Nona Boulevard in December 2017 for $9 million. The land is adjacent a vacant 67.24-acre site Adventist bought in 2016.

“Florida Hospital [AdventHealth] plans to build medical office space on the newly acquired Lake Nona property,” AdventHealth previously said in an email to OBJ. “We are expanding our presence in the Lake Nona area to meet the health care needs of this fast-growing community in the years to come. Florida Hospital’s goal is to make health care easier to access by having facilities located within 10 miles of 90 percent of the Central Florida population.”

AdventHealth parent Adventist Health System is the second-largest employer in the area with more than 83,000 employees for 2018. The health care system operates nearly 50 hospital campuses and hundreds of care sites across the U.S. in almost a dozen states and serves more than 5 million patients each year.
Founded in 1908, the $3.36 billion nonprofit AdventHealth system headed up by CEO Daryl Tol provided $45.3 million in uncompensated health care in 2016.

Source: OBJ