Becker's Hospital Review

82 STRATEGY & INNOVATION How Mercy Created a $54M Virtual Hospital in St. Louis By Erin Dietsche I n October 2015, Mercy Hospital St. Louis opened a $54 million, four-story hospital — and it doesn't have any beds, according to CNN Money. Mercy's Virtual Care Center doesn't hold patients, but is instead home to 330 staffers designated to provide care to patients via telemedicine. Mercy's goal when building the hospital was to cut down on readmis- sions, the costs of which can drastically increase over time, according to the article. And the initiative is working. Since launching last fall, the Virtual Care Center has led to a more than 33 percent decrease in Mercy's emergency room visits and hospitalizations. But it isn't all easy. Mercy's telemedicine "navigators" have to help patients un- derstand virtual healthcare can be just as effective as a visit to the hospital. "You have to break that whole clinic kind of thinking with nursing: 'Oh my gosh, he needs to go to the ER,'" said Dan Milner, a Mercy navigator. "[ere's] an antiquated idea of how people think healthcare should be." n Yale-New Haven Physician to Debut 'Price is Right' Game — For Hospital Charges By Brooke Murphy A New Haven, Conn.-based physician will take on a new role as "Dr. Bob Barker" in a hospital price guessing game modeled after "The Price Is Right", Yale Daily News reports. Adam Berkwitt, MD, is an assistant professor of pediatrics at Yale School of Medicine and a pediatric hospitalist at Yale -New Haven (Conn.) Children's Hospital. Dr. Berkwitt will pre- mier the game for City-Wide Open Studios, the nearly month- long New Haven arts festival, to help people better under- stand the costs of healthcare. "The Price is Right" asks contestants to guess the prices of con- sumer products like blenders and icemakers, rewarding chips for their correct answers. Contestants then drop the chips on a pegboard in a game called "plinko" to try and win various prizes. In Dr. Berkwitt's edition, contestants will win plinko chips for correctly guessing the prices of various over-the-counter medications and medical items. They must guess how much a consumer would pay for the item at a retail store and how much a hospital would charge for the item. Players will also drop a chip in the 13-foot plinko board to de- termine their insurance status and if they have a chronic illness. Dr. Berkwitt told Yale Daily News he hopes the game will help consumers learn about the expensive nature of American healthcare, the costs of living with a chronic illness and the impact of medical debt. n 87% of CFOs Say Outcome of Presidential Election Will Affect Future Business Growth By Ayla Ellison M ore than 80 percent of CFOs in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries say their com- panies' future performance depends, at least in part, on the outcome of the U.S. presidential election, according to a Deloitte survey. The survey includes responses from 122 CFOs of com- panies in the U.S., Canada and Mexico across nine in- dustries, including healthcare. Across all industries, 87 percent of U.S. CFOs said future performance of their companies depends somewhat on the outcome of the presidential election — with 17 per- cent saying future performance significantly or strongly depends on the outcome of the election. Of the CFOs surveyed, 74 percent identified themselves as Republicans, 8 percent identified as Democrats and 19 percent identified as Independent or other. n Kaufman Hall: 2016 Hospital M&A Activity Keeping Pace With 2015 By Ayla Ellison K aufman Hall, a provider of strategic, capital, financial and transaction advisory services and soware tools, identified 77 hospital and health system transactions in the first three quarters of 2016, compared with 78 transactions announced in the same period of 2015. "It is not surprising that hospital transactions are continuing at this volume," said Kit Kamholz, managing director of Kaufman Hall. "Payers and purchasers are intensifying their demands across mul- tiple dimensions of value, and few organizations can rely solely on internal resources to meet those demands." Of the transactions identified in the first three quarters of this year, 25 were announced in the third quarter. Forty percent of the third-quarter transactions involved for-profit acquirers, according to Kaufman Hall. Two of the transactions announced in the third quarter involved organizations with more than $1 billion in revenue. In September, Boston-based Steward Health Care System secured $1.25 billion from real estate investment firm Medical Properties Trust. NYU Langone Medical Center's proposed affiliation with Winthrop-Uni- versity Hospital in Mineola, N.Y., also involves organizations with more than $1 billion in revenue, according to Kaufman Hall. n

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