Thursday, June 16, 2016
The Wisconsin Heart Hospital, which opened in Wauwatosa at a cost of $44 million in 2006, will close in early July after a decade during which it lost money in most years and posted only marginal profits in its best years.
The hospital — officially known as the Midwest Spine and Orthopedic Hospital and Wisconsin Heart Hospital since 2013 — is part of Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare's operations in southeastern Wisconsin.
In February, those operations became part of Ascension Health, the nation's largest nonprofit health system and the parent of Columbia St. Mary's and Ministry Health in Wisconsin.
Wheaton said that 85% of the Wisconsin Heart Hospital's 192 employees would be offered other jobs in the health system and that it was working to find jobs for the remaining employees.
The hospital, 10000 W. Blue Mound Road, will not schedule patients after July 1 and will close by July 8 or when the last patient has been discharged.
Its emergency department also will close at that point, and any patients who need to be admitted in the last two days will be transferred to Wheaton Franciscan-Elmbrook Memorial Campus in Brookfield or to Wheaton Franciscan-St. Joseph Campus in Milwaukee, according to a Wheaton news release.
Wheaton plans to expand services at its Elmbrook Memorial campus, including adding a second catheterization lab in the next five months and an electrophysiology lab at a later date.
Some of the hospital's equipment will be moved to Elmbrook Memorial or other sites.
Wheaton also said plans for the Wauwatosa campus will be announced in the coming months.
The health system does not own the medical office building that adjoins the hospital, and a wall will be built between the hospital and building once the hospital is closed.
The Wisconsin Heart Hospital opened at a time when hospitals that specialized in cardiology and orthopedics, two of the most profitable hospital services, were opening throughout the country.
But the hospital struggled from the beginning, failing to take market share from Aurora Health Care, which dominates cardiac care in the Milwaukee area, or from nearby Froedtert Hospital, the academic medical center for the Medical College of Wisconsin.
The hospital — initially 51% owned by doctors and other investors who were later bought out by Wheaton — lost more than $18 million from its opening in 2006 through the 2011 fiscal year.
It began doing orthopedic procedures that year and reported net income of $1 million in its 2012 fiscal year and $1.1 million in its 2013 fiscal year, according to information filed with the Wisconsin Health Association.
Wheaton subsequently rebranded the hospital, adding Midwest Spine and Orthopedic Hospital to the signage, with the hope of duplicating the success of the Midwest Orthopedic Specialty Hospital in Franklin and Orthopedic Hospital of Wisconsin in Glendale.
Those two hospitals, each now partly owned by physicians and Ascension, have had pre-tax profit margins approaching or topping 40%.
But the Wauwatosa hospital reported a net loss of $764,993, on revenue of $43.5 million, for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2014, the most recent year for which information is publicly available.
Some other heart hospitals also have disappointed investors.
The Heart Hospital of Milwaukee, owned by physicians and investors, opened in Glendale in late 2003 and closed 13 months later.
The number of open-heart procedures has dropped dramatically in the past five years, though demand for cardiac services such as angioplasties continues to increase, said Jeff Hoffman, a senior partner with Kurt Salmon, a consulting firm.
And heart hospitals have to staff emergency departments and must offer an array of complex services.
"It's a vastly expensive proposition," Hoffman said.
Their patients overall also tend to be older and sicker. They also typically are covered by Medicare, which doesn't pay as well as commercial health plans.
"It's a harder service line to do well in than orthopedics," Hoffman said.
Source : jsonline.com
