Pay-for-Value Healthcare Creates Options

IRVINE, CA-As healthcare real estate moves away from hospitals as the place of healthcare delivery, it is moving toward ambulatory facilities, Stephen Jones, chairman/CEO of locally based builder Snyder Langston, tells GlobeSt.com. This shift is creating new product types within the commercial real estate industry.

As GlobeSt.com reported exclusively earlier today, Snyder Langston has expanded its healthcare division and named Lee Watkins as VP to focus on growth in the health systems sector of Snyder Langston's work. Regarding the move, Jones said, “Snyder Langston's goal is to continually expand and enhance our leadership to be at the forefront of our clients' building needs. Expanding our healthcare team with proven talent is another step we are taking to raise the bar in this very important property sector.”

According to Jones, there is currently a significant shift in the business model of healthcare delivery as employers demand better value and health plans and providers respond. “At one level, this manifests itself in tiered narrow networks of providers (reducing choices and lowing costs), but more importantly, there is a shift away from payments for services performed to payment for value.”

Jones adds that in the pay-for-value world, the providers—hospitals and physicians—are creating integrated, coordinated systems of care that provide definable results with transparent costs. “In order to achieve this, a basic tenet is to provide the right care, at the right place, at the right time. The 'right place' is increasingly not in the acute hospital setting, but in one of many types of ambulatory facilities.”

The ambulatory facilities to which Jones refers include community “patient center medical homes” occupied by primary-care physicians and broad-care teams that, in addition to the physicians and nursing, often include nutritionists, pharmacists and behavioral-health professionals. “These are relatively small facilities located close to the consumer. Larger facilities, fewer in number, include a larger number of care teams and ancillary services such as imaging, lab and pharmacy. Larger still are the integrated regional care centers with all of the above, plus surgery, GI labs, etc.—essentially a hospital without a bed.”

The builder is active in the strategies that these facilities support, such as the design and workflows of the staff, as well as the construction of all of these care-delivery types, Jones adds. “Our belief is that variations of these facilities, located in the community based on the demographics, will meet the desires and needs of an every-increasingly involved consumer/patient.”