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Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, the only pediatric trauma center in Miami-Dade County, is suing the state to challenge a law that would permanently allow another hospital to operate a competing trauma center without having to undergo the same kind of scrutiny, saying that the competition could functionally put Nicklaus’ facility out of business.
Nicklaus filed a lawsuit late last week against the state Department of Health to stop Kendall Regional Medical Center, which is owned by the Hospital Corporation of America, from operating as a Level I trauma center in the region. The department regulates which facilities have approval to operate as trauma centers, which treat the most serious injuries like gunshot wounds and severe burns.
The lawsuit, filed in Leon County circuit court, contends that part of the law — which was passed in March — violates the state Constitution by being written so narrowly that it amounts to a “special law” for Kendall alone. State statute requires that lawmakers notify the public in advance or hold a referendum for voters in the area before pushing through a law that grants a benefit to a private corporation.
A provision in the law requires the state to grant Level I trauma status to any center that had provisional approval for that tier before January 2017 but still did not have final verification by December. Kendall was granted provisional authority as a Level I trauma center in May 2016, though Nicklaus Children’s Hospital — which is part of the Miami Children’s Health System — had challenged the initial approval.
The new law would make Kendall’s trauma status permanent without the facility being required to go through a review or an on-site verification survey, attorneys said.

The lawsuit claims the law allows the Kendall trauma center “to automatically bypass in-depth review, including a determination of need, and to receive the department’s final approval as a Level I trauma center without meeting the same requirements and standards, and undergoing the same approval process, as other hospitals.”

Lawyers for Nicklaus also claimed that allowing Kendall to permanently operate as a Level I center would so limit Nicklaus’ coverage area and revenue that “the predicted volume reduction would amount to a constructive closure of [Nicklaus’] pediatric trauma program.”
Competition from Kendall, attorneys wrote, would drive up demand for a limited number of trauma personnel. Some pediatric patients have already been diverted to Kendall, which is a few miles away, the lawsuit added — the volume of Nicklaus’ trauma alerts during 2016-2017 decreased by 30 percent, according to hospital director of governmental relations Lani Ferro. Nicklaus “is likely to suffer irreparable harm because any final approval of Kendall’s Level I status, and the significant damage flowing therefrom, cannot be undone,” the suit alleged.

“This special law is devastating to the standard of care for the region’s children,” Narendra Kini, CEO of Nicklaus Children’s Health System, said in a statement. “Furthermore, this law will only fragment trauma care and decrease pediatric subspecialty expertise, as pediatric trauma centers afford children a better chance at survival.”

Kendall Regional Medical Center and Hospital Corporation of America — better known as HCA — did not respond to requests for comment.
The legislation including the clause for Kendall was a broad-reaching bill that sought to overhaul the state’s trauma system after years of lawsuits over various facilities in the state — in part as HCA has opened trauma centers at its own hospitals.
Hospitals with more established trauma centers have long fought approvals for new centers, arguing that too many facilities would cut into a limited number of cases and lessen the amount of practice their providers get treating complicated injuries. HCA has argued in the past that adding more facilities expands access to care for seriously injured patients.
State Sen. Dana Young, R-Tampa, who shepherded through the compromise legislation, said the trauma bill was a “nice balance of all competing interests” that had sought to resolve several disputes by grandfathering in facilities that had already received provisional approval from the state or those that had received verification and had their status challenged.

“It wasn’t like picking one or two or leaving others out. We tried to be very consistent,” she said. “The bill took a broad brush in order to get our trauma center statute back on track.”

Kendall was among about half a dozen facilities that were subject to similar grandfathering clauses to resolve their trauma status, according to a final bill analysis. Included was Aventura Hospital and Medical Center, another HCA facility, which had received final approval as a Level II trauma center but had its status disputed by Jackson Memorial Hospital.
Ferro said Nicklaus was not included in the crafting of the bill and began meeting with lawmakers in February to object to the grandfathering provision that was eventually adopted. The law was passed unanimously by both chambers and signed into law by Gov. Rick Scott, a former HCA executive.

Representatives for Nicklaus at the time “didn’t want Kendall approved under any circumstances,” Young added. “I didn’t think that was an appropriate resolution.”

The law also added a strict need formula that would make adding any additional new trauma centers beyond those grandfathered in more difficult. It also reduced the number of “trauma service areas” to 18 regions and created an advisory council to propose criteria for future approvals.
Source: Miami Herald

This fall, Mount Sinai Medical Center plans to open a medical office building and stand-alone emergency room in Hialeah — 15 miles from its hospital on Miami Beach and less than a mile from Palmetto General’s own ER.
Meanwhile, Baptist Health, the South Miami-Dade powerhouse, is finishing a large medical center on South Beach that will open later this year.
That’s going into Sinai’s heartland. “You bet!” says Ana Lopez-Blazquez, chief strategy and transformation officer for Baptist Health South Florida.
If this isn’t an all-out hospital war in South Florida, it certainly seems to be getting close to it as hospitals accelerate the trend of developing outpatient centers throughout the region — often providing urgent care to millennials and others who don’t have established relationships with doctors.
Cash-rich Baptist Health, with $2.9 billion in reserves, has 20 new outpatient facilities planned over the next five years. The health systems of Jackson, Nicklaus Children’s and Memorial have at least two each listed as “coming soon.”
Most consumers think of hospitals and health systems as components in critical care. But they are also businesses — although sometimes nonprofit — whose ability to deliver high-quality care and attract top medical professionals depend on their own financial well-being.
Today, that includes delivering services at multiple locations. “This is the future of the industry,” says Ben Riestra, chief administrator of UHealth’s Lennar Foundation Medical Center in Coral Gables — eight miles from its main medical campus.
The $155 million, five-story Lennar Center structure on the University of Miami’s Coral Gables campus, which opened in late 2016, provides everything from sports medicine to oncology, but most particularly many outpatient procedures.

“Total shoulder repair, interventional radiology — a lot of services that used to be inpatient are now outpatient,” Riestra says.

“There is a clear trend … toward outpatient care,” says Sal Barbera, a former hospital exec who’s a professor at Florida International University. And the increase in outpatient facilities is coming for many reasons that signal a major shift in America’s healthcare system.

The American Hospital Association reports inpatient admissions have been falling steadily since 2008. Outpatient surgeries now outnumber inpatient operations, and total outpatient revenue for hospitals has risen from 28 percent in 1994 to about 45 percent in 2014.
As the inpatient facilities become less important, hospitals seek out new locations to attract patients, not only to get their outpatient business but set them up to be inpatients if the need arises, says Steven Ullmann, professor of health-sector management and policy at the University of Miami.
This outpatient trend is bolstered “as the health field moves from volume-based to value-based,” says Ashley Thompson, an AHA executive.
Ullmann explains that this industry jargon refers to the long-held belief that the American healthcare system — the most expensive in the world despite the fact that life expectancies in the U.S. are short, relative to those in many other industrial countries — must undergo profound changes.
Currently, every service delivered in a hospital tends to be billed separately. For instance, a hip replacement involves separate fees for use of the facility, the anesthesiologist, the surgeon and other goods and services, right down to the notorious $7 aspirin.
What that means: American healthcare is now like buying a car by paying Sam for a bumper, George for an engine, Judy for the steering wheel and so on. It makes more sense to make one payment for the whole vehicle at an auto dealer. And eventually, Ullmann, Barbera and many others believe, the country will move toward a bundled payment for that hip surgery.
Now add in the Obamacare push to increase accountability, meaning hospitals are responsible for post-operative care for that hip surgery and face penalties if a patient must be readmitted.
Together, these concepts encourage hospitals to control networks of physical therapists, doctors and others to provide the bundled care run by a single entity. When the patient leaves the hospital, a network social worker makes sure she gets her prescription filled. A therapist works on mobility issues. The system works more effectively, and efficiently, when the hospital is linked with outpatient sites that provide such services.
Another factor: Healthcare providers are trying to improve patient satisfaction.

“People don’t like to be in hospitals,” Ullman says. “The technology is great, but the quality of the experience is low. And it’s much more expensive to be in the hospital.” Patients are generally happier in outpatient settings.

For some hospitals, such as Mount Sinai, going outpatient is a matter of survival.
Fifteen years ago, experts forecast that stand-alone hospitals such as Sinai were doomed when competing against large chains. Steven Sonenreich, Sinai’s chief executive, says his hospital couldn’t grow in Miami Beach, where the population has remained stable at about 90,000, so he has expanded with 11 locations from Sunny Isles to Key West. Now, 70 percent of Sinai patients come from outside Miami Beach.
Another driver: a long-standing shortage of primary care doctors — exacerbated by the trend that many new doctors don’t want the hassle of running their own practices. In 2016, the American Medical Association reported that for the first time, less than half the nation’s physicians had an ownership stake in their practices.
One impact: More people are using emergency rooms for basic care. More than 20 years ago, Brian Keeley, chief executive of Baptist Health, realized that the Baptist Hospital ER was crammed with “people who really weren’t that sick,” Lopez-Blazquez says.
That started the creation of urgent-care centers — and hospitals directly employing doctors. Since 2012, Baptist’s physician employees has gone from about 100 to 255. The number at Mount Sinai’s has doubled in the past five or so years, Sonenreich says. Most of these Baptist and Sinai doctors work in outpatient settings.
Insurers, too, are driving the trend, UM’s Ullmann says. Many lately are trying to control costs by putting consumers in “very narrow networks” that the insurers have negotiated deep discounts with, so that a single entity could provide hospital, doctor and other services.
What’s more, many employers are moving toward high-deductible plans — an incentive for patients to seek outpatient services, which are generally cheaper than inpatient care.
A final explanation: traffic. Laura Hunter, a Jackson Health System executive, notes that “it’s very difficult to travel around Miami-Dade County.” Many consumers prefer to be treated closer to home or work.

ER CENTERS SPRING UP

One large part of the outpatient trend puzzles some healthcare experts: free-standing ERs.
Baptist has four “coming soon,” including one scheduled to open later this year near Country Walk. The Memorial system will build one in West Broward. Kendall Regional, an HCA-owned facility, has proposals for two in West Dade. Even the slow-moving Jackson Health System has plans for a stand-alone ER in Doral, which may open in two years.
Ullmann and Barbera point out that the Trump administration’s attempts to dismantle Obamacare could increase the number of uninsured, who often have to resort to ERs, where federal law requires all be treated, regardless of ability to pay — making these new ERs potential magnets for uncompensated care.
Offsetting this threat are potential benefits. Barbera suggests hospitals may be focused more on “trying to position themselves for access points” to get new patients as Baby Boomers age. Ullmann notes the new stand-alone ERs are “generally not in low-income areas,” meaning hospitals are most intent on seeking paying patients.

“In reality, we don’t have an option,” says Lopez-Blazquez at Baptist. The system needs to “decompress” its always-full ERs at its South Dade hospitals. Its first stand-alone will open “right across the street from Tamiami Airport” in the fall. But it’s also planning free-standing facilities in Doral and Miami Lakes, considerable distance from its hospitals.

Barbera and Ullmann wonder whether ambulances will take patients to an emergency room where they could not be immediately transferred to an operating room if need be. Miami-Dade Fire Rescue did not respond to four requests for comment.
The answers to many of these questions may come from Mount Sinai, which a decade ago opened the first stand-alone ER in Miami-Dade — a mile from Aventura Hospital in affluent Northeast Dade.

Sonenreich says it has worked out well: “We do about 20,000 visits there a year, and that generates 1,500 admissions” to the Beach hospital, 12 miles away. Fire Rescue brings patients there “from time to time” but mostly it’s “people who are driving themselves or walking in.”

For Hialeah, Sinai is constructing a three-story medical center on four acres near the Palmetto Expressway that will include 24 emergency treatment bays on the first floor, with physician and clinical offices on the second and third.
Palmetto General, a Tenet Healthcare facility, fought the expansion by urging local doctors to ask Hialeah officials to stop the project. That failed.

Still, Shelly Weiss Friedberg, Palmetto General spokesperson, says there’s no need for Sinai’s intrusion: “Our community is well-served from an emergency-care perspective as there are already three hospitals,” and Palmetto General recently expanded its ER with with a “new 31-bed clinical decision unit to help reduce wait times.”

Sonenreich maintains the area is poorly served: “We notice that 85,000 people every year leave [the Hialeah area] to go to other hospital emergency departments.”
Barbera, the former hospital exec, remains skeptical about a stand-alone ER: “I wouldn’t go to one. I’d go where there was a hospital connected, if you needed backup.”

EXPRESS CLINICS

In the spectrum of outpatient services, the most basic is the express clinic, a place to go for a flu bug or vaccine, often open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
In South Florida, UHealth, the medical enterprise of the University of Miami, took over operation last year of the clinics at 17 Walgreens (seven in Dade, seven in Broward and three in Palm Beach counties), using nurse practitioners who can write basic prescriptions and are overseen by UM physicians. It’s possible to make appointments on line.
CVS has Minute Clinics in some of its stores, and Baptist is getting into this space too, with Express Care clinics in Country Walk and Key Biscayne and others “coming soon” in Doral and Parkland.
The next step up is urgent care, with doctors on site, ready for walk-ins and sometimes offering same-day appointments. Some have imaging equipment on site.
Of the hospital groups, Baptist has been the most aggressive, with 18 urgent-care centers already open, stretching all the way north to Wellington in Palm Beach County, with another three “opening soon.” Memorial opened one in December, and another is planned for later this year.
HCA, the national for-profit hospital chain, appears to have five urgent-care centers in eastern Florida, all in the Treasure Coast area. Tenet Healthcare, another national chain, has one in North Dade (Miami Gardens), four in northern Broward and two in Palm Beach County. HCA and Tenet did not respond to requests for interviews about their outpatient activities.
Dozens of more urgent-care centers not connected to hospitals are scattered around South Florida. “For sure, it’s a heavily competitive market,” says Chris Wing, who oversees Jackson’s belated urgent-care initiative.

“Jackson has been pretty hospital-centric,” Wing says. Over the past year and a half, it has branched out a bit by opening three UHealth/Jackson urgent-care sites — Cutler Ridge, Country Walk and North Miami — with two more scheduled to open this year. The partnership uses UHealth doctors in Jackson facilities. They’re open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week, 365 days a year.

Jackson has found the core customers for urgent care are 22 to 55 years old, and roughly a third of those have no regular relationship with a doctor, Wing says. About 20 percent are children.
A step beyond urgent care are doctors practices in traditional medical office buildings. Sonenreich says that Sinai opened its first medical office in 1985 in what’s now Aventura. In the past several years, Sinai has been expanding broadly. It now employs doctors in 11 locations, generally with standard office hours Monday through Friday.
Meanwhile, UHealth long has had offices of its doctors-faculty spread around South Florida, from Naples and Kendall up to Plantation and Boca Raton. It’s now using a $50 million donation to greatly expand its cancer services in Deerfield Beach.
In Doral, Jackson plans medical offices on a new 27-acre campus at the Palmetto Expressway and 25th Street, which will include primary- and specialty-care doctors, imaging and centers for treating women and children.
The county approved the development in 2015, but construction is not expected to start until March or April, with an opening in early 2020, says Hunter, the Jackson exec. Eventually, Jackson hopes to add a 100-bed hospital in that area — Jackson West — but state approval has been delayed as several other hospitals object to the new facility.
In South Florida, picking the right location can make all the difference. Most hospitals tend to stay away from low-income areas. In North Dade, Baptist, the largest player, has no locations east of Northwest 77th Avenue.
That has left an opening along U.S. 1 in affluent Northeast Dade. In a 1.5-mile stretch between Northeast 109 and 131 streets, there are three hospital-connected practices, each with slightly different services.
About 5 p.m. on a recent weekday, two persons were waiting on plastic chairs at a Walgreens for a UHealth nurse practitioner, who was seeing a patient behind a closed door. One said she had been waiting 20 minutes.
Just up the road, no one was in the waiting room at a Health/Jackson Urgent Care Center, where a doctor was available. A receptionist said in an hour or two, after people got home from work, the wait was likely to be a half-hour.
Down the road, at Mount Sinai Miami Shores, the door was locked. A sign indicated office hours were 8:30 to 5 p.m. for three specialists in internal medicine, a urologist, a cardiologist and a general surgeon.

TURMOIL AMONG INSURERS

Such satellite sites continue to ramp up despite the roiling uncertainty about the future of American healthcare, with the Trump administration assaults on Obamacare and the huge pending merger of insurer Aetna with CVS Health, with its pharmacies and in-store clinics. Most recently came the stunning announcement that Amazon is teaming up with Warren Buffett and JP Morgan Chase to revolutionize healthcare costs.

“With Aetna and CVS,” says Sonenreich at Mount Sinai, “that’s something we’re all going to wait and see what that means. I think the more exciting news is Amazon and JP Morgan. I have incredible respect for Warren Buffett, and Amazon is the great disruptor. And JP Morgan has the money.”

Still, despite all the turmoil, Sonenreich says he’s sticking with Sinai’s hub-and-spoke strategy that “will deliver healthcare in the most efficient manner, regardless of what happens in Washington, D.C.”
Many are watching the CVS-Aetna merger. “All kinds of interesting ventures could come out of this,” Ullmann says.
One possibility: Large healthcare providers may consider the need to offer their own insurance In the past, both Baptist Health and Jackson have marketed their own plans. For both, the experience was disastrous.

“We’ve been there, done that,” says Lopez-Blazquez at Baptist. “And it’s not something we want to do again. … We ask ourselves every once in a while” whether the time is right to get back into insurance “but we land up back in the same place.”

The entrance of Amazon and partners “is going to give everybody pause,” Lopez-Blazquez says. As “the king of disruptors,” it may attempt to get rid of middle men, such as the pharmaceutical managers.
The idea of bundled-care has receded somewhat during the Trump administration, but in the long run, Lopez-Blazquez says, it makes sense for insurers to pay for the value of results, “rather than paying individually for each widget. It’s a logical approach.”

One key to the future, she believes, will be service: “One of the things we’re trying to do is be much more consumer-attentive. We’ve stopped using the word patient.”

One example of trying to stay ahead tech-wise: Baptist has started offering an app — Care on Demand, which allows you to see a doctor for $59 by phone or computer. Lopez-Blazquez says it worked well for her son. He used the app to link up with a doctor, who determined he had pink eye and zipped a prescription off to a pharmacy.
Meanwhile, many hospitals are trying to be a go-to place for certain specialties. “Everybody wants to have a cancer center,” Ullmann says.
Baptist has launched the Miami Cancer Institute in South Dade, bringing in top names and forming an alliance with Memorial Sloan Kettering, the highly regarded New York cancer center. In South Broward, Memorial Cancer Institute has forged a clinical partnership with Moffitt Cancer Center, the well-regarded Tampa-based research organization. Meanwhile, UHealth’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center continues to receive high ratings. And Sinai markets innovative therapies.

“These are market opportunities — but very costly technologies,” Ullmann says.

Last year, Baptist installed a proton therapy unit — at a cost of $90 million, including housing, Lopez-Blazquez says. UHealth announced recently it plans to start building a proton unit this spring. It has not revealed the cost.

AT WHAT PRICE?

One big final question: How expensive are outpatient services?
Experts agree that procedures are generally cheaper done in an outpatient setting. A study by a Louisville University economist in 2014 reported that outpatient surgery is usually hundreds of dollars cheaper than inpatient. But there are exceptions. In 2016, Medicare reported that stents inserted into arteries in outpatient settings cost an average of $645 more than if done inpatient.
What’s more, outpatient pricing can vary dramatically between systems, and each insurer may have negotiated a different deal.

“The whole pricing issue is extremely perplexing and difficult, if not impossible, to understand,” says Barbera, the former hospital exec. “There is no rationale.”

Bottom line: Buyer beware.
Source: The Miami Herald

Florida health care officials are offering $50 million to federally qualified health centers to help offset the costs of care they will provide to poor residents in the coming year.
It’s more money than the centers — which usually provide primary care in communities — have ever been offered under the state’s long-running Low Income Pool, or LIP, program.
But there’s a catch: To tap into it, the federally qualified health centers have to agree to a change that could impact $137 million in “wrap around” funding that’s currently paid to them.
Wrap around payments cover the difference between what managed care plans pay health clinics and the rate the federal government says the clinics should be paid for services. If a managed care plan doesn’t pay a clinic the amount the federal government has set, the state makes up the difference.
Under the special terms and conditions included in a recently approved Medicaid “waiver,” federally qualified health centers that don’t agree to accept the policy change can’t tap into this year’s LIP funding, which also includes money for Florida’s hospitals.

“This is a big change for us compared to all the years we have been participating in LIP,” Andrew Behrman, president and CEO of the Florida Association of Community Health Centers, told The News Service of Florida. “And we don’t want to blindly accept the special terms and conditions that put all the reimbursement through managed-care plans. We’ve had quite a few incidents where we’ve had issues with getting paid.”

Michael Gervasi is the CEO of Florida Community Health Centers, Inc., which operates 12 centers in six counties around Lake Okeechobee. Gervasi said his centers have contracts with about a half dozen managed care plans that participate in the statewide Medicaid managed-care program. He said he has about $400,000 in open, unpaid claims.

“Most of them, I think, are good people trying to do the right thing, but I think efficiency gets in the way,” Gervasi said of his dealings with managed-care plans, which are mostly comprised of health maintenance organizations, or HMOs.

Gervasi said managed-care plans have denied claims for a number reasons, but he primarily blamed the credentialing process. Credentialing is used to evaluate the qualifications, practice histories and educational backgrounds of doctors.
Credentialing can be delayed if a health plan has a difficult time confirming a physician’s educational background, which, Gervasi said, is bothersome, but legitimate. But there are times when the credentialing process is slowed down because it “falls through the cracks” when there’s a change of staff at an HMO.
Though he refused to disclose the name of the plan, one of the managed care plans his centers contracts with has $200,000 in unpaid claims stemming from services provided over the last 18 months, he said.

“I tell my staff every Friday, go to the AHCA (Agency for Health Care Administration) complaint line and make a complaint,” he said.

Armed with experiences like Gervasi’s, Behrman initially shared his reservations with AHCA when he was told in June about the proposed funding changes.
Then the requirement appeared in the special terms and conditions that were part of the Medicaid 1115 waiver, which reauthorized Florida’s Medicaid managed-care program. Moreover, the waiver also reauthorized the Low Income Pool, which uses local contributions to draw down matching federal Medicaid dollars. LIP funding is used to help compensate health care providers for charity care they provide.
Though the federal government authorized up to $1.5 billion in LIP spending annually for the next five years, a top state Medicaid official said a preliminary projection indicates about $790.4 million is expected to be available in the first year, including $50 million for the federally qualified health centers.
Behrman shared his concerns with the media over the summer, and the issue has risen to the attention of the Florida Senate, where it was discussed in a health-care budget committee two weeks ago and will be considered by the full Appropriations Committee this week.
Meanwhile, Behrman met with state Medicaid officials Beth Kidder and Tom Wallace for 90 minutes on Monday to discuss ways to accomplish what the agency wants but to, at the same time, give health clinics assurances they will receive full payment.

“We are working on a solution to try to ameliorate the concerns of the community health centers and to provide us with protections we need to make sure the managed-care companies follow through (on payments),” he said, adding he told Medicaid officials that they can’t “just throw us out there and expect the managed-care companies are going to go ahead and make the payments and there not be any issues.”

To accomplish that, Behrman wants the agency to include protections for the clinics in the contracts it signs with Medicaid HMOs. Comfort language could include a requirement that managed-care plans pay for covered services to Medicaid patients that are provided by Medicaid-participating physicians. It also could include timelines for health plans to complete the credentialing process.
He said Monday’s meeting with Kidder and Wallace was productive and that they will meet again next week to continue to discuss his members’ concerns.
Agency for Health Care Administration spokeswoman Shelisha Coleman wouldn’t comment on the tenor of the meeting but said in a prepared statement that the state “will continue working with everyone to ensure that we have the best models to provide care for families.”
Behrman said he hopes that if the language is included in the contracts between the state and the managed-care plans, the 48 federally qualified health centers he represents will agree to the change. But at the end of the day, he said, each health center will have the ability to decide whether it wants to participate in LIP.
Gervasi said the 12 federally qualified health centers in his organization will qualify for $600,000 under the state’s proposed LIP model. Nevertheless, his health centers may end up walking away from the program this year, he said.

“My (chief financial officer) has already said to me if the managed care companies are responsible for my wrap-around payments, we’re going to lose more money than the $600,000.

Source: WLRN

After recently opening its expanded emergency room, Aventura Hospital & Medical Center will seek city approval for even bigger growth with new patient beds and a parking garage.
On June 14, the city commission was scheduled to vote on the proposal by the hospital, which is owned by HCA Corp. (NYSE: HCA). It has requested a larger setback from the street, increased density and less open space in order to accommodate its site plan.
The 407-bed Aventura Hospital & Medical Center is located on the 19.7-acre site at 20900 Biscayne Blvd. It recently completed a $75.6 million emergency department expansion with 22 new rooms. The hospital was designated a Level II trauma center last year.
Aventura Hospital’s new expansion plan calls for a three-story building of 86,900 square feet for patient care plus a 506-space parking garage. The patient care building would be on the east side of the existing south tower and feature 60 patient rooms, waiting rooms and a lounge.
During construction of the building in what is now a parking lot, the hospital would lease off-site parking for its employees and provide them with shuttle service until the new parking garage is done, according to the application.
The patient tower was designed by is Earl Swensson Associates in Nashville, Tennessee and the parking garage was designed by R.R. Simmons in Tampa.
An official from HCA couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

“The proposed improvements will enable the hospital to expand its services and continue to provide outstanding health benefits to Aventura residents and the surrounding communities,” Shutts & Bowen attorney Alexander I. Tachmes, stated in the hospital’s application to the city. “The addition will provide additional beds that need to be connected to the main hospital building on the east campus to provide efficient patient care and maximize the use of resources, including services, equipment and staff. It will also enhance patient comfort, safety and security by allowing easy access between departments without forcing patients to leave the building.”

Source: SFBJ