Construction for a $38 million surgical hospital focusing solely on orthopedic care and backed by 12 OSU-based surgeons is set to begin in New Albany today.
The New Albany Surgical Hospital is scheduled to open summer 2003. The 95,000 square-foot hospital, to be located at Smith’s Mill Road and U.S. Route 62, will have eight operating rooms and 30 inpatient rooms.
Citing a widespread desire for customized medical treatments, investors in the new facility said the time has come for specialized hospitals such as this one to enter the Columbus health-care market. This will be the first of its kind in central Ohio.
When a hospital such as the New Albany facility concentrates exclusively on one field of medicine, it leads to better patient care, said Dr. Carl Berasi, an investor and orthopedic surgeon at Ohio State University Hospitals East.
Berasi anticipates the New Albany Surgical Hospital will provide high quality and efficient orthopedic care, along with research and educational opportunities for physicians and medical students, because the focus of the hospital is so tailored.
“You become better at what you do just by the sheer volume of it,” he said.
The Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, an orthopedics-only hospital, is recognized as one of the best specialty facilities in the country, Berasi said. The doctors at that hospital, and others like it, perform many surgeries and perform them well, he said.
For this reason specialty hospitals tend to be profitable. However, Berasi insisted making money is not the driving force behind the hospital’s philosophy.
“I don’t know if it will be more or less profitable,” he said. “There will be no attempt to select cases based upon a patient’s insurance or lack thereof. We want to extend the envelope, as opposed to contracting it.”
Some people at area full-service hospitals are skeptical.
Mark Hopkins, spokesman for OhioHealth, said he is concerned the future opening of the New Albany Surgical Hospital will jeopardize the way medical treatments are delivered to central Ohioans. OhioHealth controls Grant Medical Center, Riverside Methodist Hospital and Doctors Hospital North and West.
“There’s definitely a problem when for-profit hospitals move into the same area as not-for-profit hospitals,” Hopkins said. “It undermines the entire system of how health care is delivered.”
In such situations, the bottom line becomes top priority, he said.
R. Reed Fraley, CEO of Ohio State Medical Center, also said he is worried such specialty hospitals tend to be profit-driven, which could be detrimental to the health-care system.
” ‘Boutique’ hospitals do not have all the obligations or underpinnings of academic medical centers or full-service community hospitals,” Fraley said in a statement.
Niche hospitals do not have the same commitment to research and education, and could possibly threaten many of the programs offered by research and education hospitals and other full-service community hospitals, Fraley said.
The hospital’s goal of treating patients with very specialized and specific surgical procedures contrasts sharply with the method of across-the-board medical care delivered by physicians at other Columbus hospitals. However, such differences don’t always equal dramatic conflict, Berasi said, referring to the question of competition between the hospitals.
“There are different facilities for different (medical) problems,” Berasi said. “We recognize there will be some problems that are best treated somewhere else.”
The hospital was the vision of the Surgical Alliance Corp., a developer of medical facilities based out of Nashville, Tenn. Its goal is to partner with physicians’ groups to manage ambulatory surgery centers and specialty surgical hospitals. Surgical Alliance was formed in July 2001 by Kenny Hancock, former chief development officer of Ortholink Physicians Corp.
Berasi emphasized physicians in the Columbus area have entertained the possibility of such a facility for quite a while.
“The idea isn’t owned by anyone,” he said. “A large number of physicians have had this in the back of their heads for years.”
