Dive Brief:
- With Medicare encouraging shorter inpatient stays and hospital vacancy rates growing, health leaders are turning away from building massive acute care facilities for all purposes.
- Instead, acute care hospitals are focusing on outpatient services such as retail-based facilities and community care clinics housing multiple specialties, imaging and outpatient surgery.
- Acute care facilities are taking these steps to attract commercially-insured patients, positioning their new facilities in areas convenient to such patients.
Dive Insight:
With increasing pressure to reduce inpatient stays, cutting into the profits large acute-care facilities once generated, it's only logical that hospital leaders should be seeking ways to build their community care and retail base. Especially for those located in areas where lower-paying Medicare and Medicaid payment dominate their patient mix, reaching out to prosperous suburbs stocked with commercially-insured workers may mean the difference between success and failure over time.
That being said, one area of hospital real estate development—development of medical office buildings on campus—continues to be common. In fact, some experts think medical office development will expand over the next few years, fueled by patient volume generated by the ACA. In fact, real estate developers are predicting slow but steady growth in the construction of medical offices by hospitals, in part to house the practices they acquire.