In a recent article in the North Bay Business Journal, Jan Emerson-Shea, vice president, external affairs at the California Hospital Association, was quoted, when speaking of community hospitals, as saying that, “there’s a host of challenges that all hospitals face but particularly these small, independent hospitals. Some of these hospitals file bankruptcy, some shut altogether, some are able to go to local voters, and some affiliate with larger health care systems that have the ability to keep them open and provide them access to capital.”
The Impending Death of Hospitals is hitting community hospitals particularly hard.
That, of course, is a peal of the bell that tolls for thee, if your medical group is dependent on the survival of the local hospital.
But, at the same time, it’s an opportunity for entrepreneurial physicians to participate in the repurposing of mooted hospital facilities.
Ventures we’re currently looking at include repurposing community hospital facilities as medical malls, surgery centers, “condo-ized” surgery center units, and “non-hospital hospitals.”
As the economist Joseph Schumpeter wrote in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, capitalism “is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. And this evolutionary character … incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.”
Creative destruction is taking aim directly at community hospitals. You can fight to save them. But if they’ve failed, you can, á la Shumpeter (and Weiss), take part in creating, phoenix-like, far more appropriate healthcare solutions for your community and for your profit.
Let’s talk to get started.
