Special Reports: Consultant sees ‘a whole new boom’

HEALTHCARE REFORM WILL FORCE REBUILDING OF INFRASTRUCTURE, HE PREDICTS

By Murray W. Wolf

Brett M. Hickman
Photo courtesy of InterFace

The U.S. healthcare system is “broken” and efforts to fix it will create “a whole new boom” in healthcare real estate. That was one of the key messages conveyed by the keynote speaker during the recent InterFace Medical Office conference in Chicago.

In a session titled “An Inside Look at Healthcare Reform and What to Expect from Washington, D.C.,” Brett M. Hickman of the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) LLP presented an overview of the healthcare industry – and discussed the implications for the medical real estate sector.

He spoke on April 28 to an audience of nearly 170 healthcare real estate professionals and hospital and health system executives at the Standard Club in downtown Chicago.

Healthcare ‘golden era’

“I believe highly that we’re kind of living in the golden era of healthcare,” said Mr. Hickman, a partner in PWC’s health industries advisory practice. “In most of our lifetimes, we will see cures to major cancers. We’ll see basically 50 percent of heart disease cured.

“And so we’re living in a time where our children are going to look back at us – at how we delivered healthcare – and think that we’re just absolute idiots because, economically, we just don’t do it very well.”