SAN FRANCISCO – Healthcare Real Estate Insights™ recently had an interesting conversation with the president of the New Century Healthcare Institute, which is based in San Francisco. Wanda Jones, often referred to as a healthcare futurist, is currently advocating a plan for rebuilding the state’s healthcare facilities that goes against the current conventional wisdom. As most healthcare professionals know, many California hospitals are being rebuilt, or have plans to be rebuilt, in order to comply with the state’s seismic safety law. The law, Senate Bill 1953, requires all hospitals to be able to withstand a major earthquake. Deadlines vary, with the first wave starting in 2013. Because of the current recession and the difficulty many hospitals are having accessing bonding, Ms. Jones believes that hospitals do not need to – and perhaps should not – blindly forge ahead with expensive replacement facilities, which in California are costing an average of $2 million per bed. Instead, Ms. Jones has written a white paper with a plan B for rebuilding healthcare facilities that would still allow health systems to be in compliance with SB 1953. She’s advocating the building of ambulatory care centers instead of full-blown replacement hospitals. “Not only are construction costs for ambulatory centers about one-third less than that of hospitals, but ambulatory care centers can be built to be more adaptable in the future,” says Ms. Jones. “And we all know that the science and technology of healthcare is going to be changing dramatically. It’s hard to change the structure of a hospital building, but it would not be as hard to change the structure and design of an ambulatory care building, which could be built to be more adaptable.” She adds that hospitals are more heavily regulated than ambulatory facilities. A healthcare campus with a large ambulatory care center could include a long-stay hotel where a patient’s condition could be remotely monitored by healthcare professionals. Following such a plan, according to Ms. Jones, would reduce the state’s healthcare costs because health systems would not be taking on “mammoth” amounts of debt to build replacement hospitals. Are people listening? “No one is responding out loud to what I’ve proposed,” says Ms. Jones, who is quoted quite often in local news reports focused on healthcare and healthcare projects. “And that’s because they have a great deal of money invested in rebuilding hospitals and they don’t have other solutions. But I think they should start looking at something other than just going ahead and rebuilding at prices that will continue to drive up healthcare costs even more.”
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