Becker's Hospital Review

14 CFO / FINANCE Rural Georgia hospital to close By Alia Paavola F inancial strain is prompting the closure of Northridge Medical Center, a 90-bed hospital in Commerce, Ga., according to Georgia Health News. At the time of publication, the facility was slated to close Oct. 31. The hospital has lost $5 million a year for the last three years and is projecting a $4 million loss this year. "We kept thinking we were going to turn it around," George Hunt, an executive vice president of the hospital's parent company Ethica Health and Retirement Communities, told Georgia Health News in August. Mr. Hunt said that the financial hit from the COVID-19 pandemic didn't factor into closing Northridge Medical. Ethica had been searching for a buyer, but couldn't find one, he said. With the announcement, Northridge Medical Center be- comes the second rural facility in Georgia to reveal plans to close in a 30-day period. In late July, the 25-bed South- west Georgia Regional Medical Center in Cuthbert, Ga., announced plans to close by Oct. 22. n Essentia Health delays opening of $900M hospital campus by 1 year By Alia Paavola D uluth, Minn.-based Essentia Health will delay opening its new hospital campus to patients until fall 2023, a year later than originally planned, ac- cording to the StarTribune. Dubbed the Vision Northland project, the upgrade will include construction of a hospital, clinic and outpatient surgery center. The project is now slated to cost $900 million, an increase of $100 million from original estimates. The delay is primarily because the size of the project has grown, which has resulted in additional planning, design and estimating, an Essentia spokesperson told the Star- Tribune. The spokesperson added that only one day of construction was lost due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project will now include 942,000 square feet of construc- tion, up from 928,000 square feet, according to the report. The added square footage will add one additional patient floor to the hospital and additional outpatient care spaces. The project will add a 15-story hospital tower and an eight-story clinic. n Northwestern plans outpatient center in Chicago neighborhood slated to lose hospital By Alia Paavola N orthwestern Medicine, a 10-hospital system in Chi- cago, plans to build an outpatient care center in a South Side neighborhood that is slated to lose its 170-year-old inpatient hospital next year, according to The Chicago Sun-Times. The ambulatory center, which would need regulatory ap- proval, would be 75,000 square feet and house an urgent care center, primary care clinic and specialty care services in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. The facility would partially fill a void in the community if the closure of Mercy Hospital & Medical Center moves forward, according to the report. In July, Mercy announced plans to close between Feb. 1 and May 31, 2021, pending approval from a state review board. The hospital said it could no longer sustain monthly operating losses of $4 million. Livonia, Mich.-based Trinity Health, which owns Mercy, said it tried for 18 months to sell or find a partner for the 292- bed hospital, contacting more than 20 potential partners. n Mayo hits pause on luxury hotel plan By Molly Gamble C iting the COVID-19 pandemic, Mayo Clinic in Au- gust suspended its plan for an 11-story expansion that includes a seven-story luxury hotel on its Roch- ester, Minn., campus, according to the Post Bulletin. The plan, which Mayo rolled out in fall 2018, was a joint venture with Singapore-based real estate developer Pon- tiac Land that called for adding 11 stories to the 21-story Gonda Building, which would have made it the tallest sky- scraper in Rochester. Seven floors were to be designed as a luxury hotel, and four floors would be a clinical space expansion for Mayo's cancer center and outpatient procedure center. The ho- tel was set to be operated by an unidentified major hotel group. Construction was set to begin later this year — after a delay from the initial forecast of late 2019 or early 2020 — and be completed by 2022. Mayo officials said the clinic will spend about $190 million on its part of the venture, but estimates of the total cost of the project have not been released, according to the Post Bulletin. n

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