USF medical school requests its own hospital

[achiever1911]

http://www.sptimes.com/2008/02/14/Hillsborough/USF_medical_school_re.shtml

TAMPA - The University of South Florida medical school wants to build its own teaching hospital to reach its goal of becoming a top research university, USF leaders said Wednesday.

A bill filed for the upcoming legislative session could bring that dream a giant step closer to reality. It would allow USF to build a hospital on its campus without getting key permission from state regulators.

"USF medical school, which is now about 40 years old, is one of the few medical schools in America that doesn't have its own hospital," said state Sen. Dennis Jones, R-Seminole, who sponsored the bill after meeting with Dr. Stephen Klasko, medical school dean.

Instead, USF's graduate medical students train and its faculty doctors are on staff at several Tampa Bay area hospitals. Tampa General Hospital is its primary teaching hospital.

A hospital would allow USF to recruit more high-profile faculty members, increase the number of its residents and generate revenue, making it less dependent on state funding, Klasko said Wednesday.

"We are looking at how we can be a vehicle to make Tampa into a greater health care city," he said. "I think it's my responsibility to make sure that this great city has one of the best academic health systems in the country."

What's less clear is how USF's teaching partners, especially at Tampa General, feel about the idea of a new, possibly competing hospital in their back yard.

Ron Hytoff, Tampa General's president and chief executive, declined to answer questions. Instead, he issued a written statement.

"This has created a new wrinkle in an already complicated situation that we are in the process of evaluating," Hytoff said. "Since USF is our strategic partner we do not want to rush to judgment. We are carefully assessing the details of this bill and maintaining a dialogue with the university."

At All Children's Hospital, which teaches USF residents, president and CEO Gary Carnes wasn't available late Wednesday for comment.

If the bill passes, USF wouldn't have to get a state Certificate of Need for the hospital, but it still would have to get the approval of state education officials.

If USF builds its own hospital, it would be a "small but focused" hospital with about 200 beds. It wouldn't take residency slots away from its existing partners, Klasko said. Such signature programs as maternal-fetal medicine would stay at Tampa General, he said.

Nor would it try to imitate H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute or All Children's Hospital.

"Everything we've been talking about would be done cooperatively with Moffitt and Tampa General and All Children's," Klasko said. "It's not meant to be a substitute for them."

Florida already has too few doctors in certain specialties, partly because its residency programs aren't large enough, Jones said. Medical students in Florida often leave the state after they graduate to get further training and never return.

"They would have a catalyst to draw residents from other parts of the U.S.," Jones said. "Even in Pinellas County now, we only have four or five neurosurgeons in a county with a million people."

USF has about 600 residents. Adding a hospital could add 30 to 100 spaces. It would allow USF to revive its defunct anesthesiology program, as well as provide more training in radiology, pathology and orthopedics, Klasko said.

In today's tight budget climate, funding the hospital could be hard. USF might issue bonds or even bring in another hospital as a partner, Klasko said.

But, he said, a hospital would profit USF.

"The ability to garner revenues is a very important part of not having to depend on the state," he said. "I would look at this as exactly what we ought to be doing."

Lisa Greene can be reached at greene@sptimes.com or(813) 226-3322.

[USFan]

A follow-up... I hope it gets approved!

USF College of Medicine faces 'decision point' about its future

TAMPA -- Thirty-seven years after admitting its first class of students, the University of South Florida College of Medicine and the larger USF Health organization of which it is a part stand at a crossroads.

USF, one of about 25 so-called community-based medical schools in the United States that send medical students to community hospitals for training, has made the first tentative steps toward building its own hospital on campus. A bill pending in the Florida Legislature, sponsored by Sen. Dennis Jones, R-Seminole, would allow construction of a teaching hospital on property owned by a state university with an accredited medical school without first having to obtain state regulatory approval.

If approved, it would be the second hospital on the USF's Tampa campus. The H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute has a 162-bed hospital for cancer patients.

USF's proposed 200-bed hospital would follow the Moffitt model but handle a wide array of diseases.

http://www.bizjournals.com/tampabay/stories/2008/03/10/focus2.html

[Paisa el Toro]

Further follow-up regarding this issue:

http://www.tampabay.com/news/health/medicine/article432764.ece

USF's desire for a teaching hospital reveals tensions with Tampa General Hospital

By Lisa Greene, Times Staff Writer

Published Wednesday, March 26, 2008 9:30 PM

Dr. Stephen Klasko of USF’s medical school said Tampa isn’t the best place for health care.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TAMPA  The ambitious proposal to build a hospital on the University of South Florida campus has stalled, but not before exposing tensions between USF and its primary teaching hospital, Tampa General.

Leaders at the two institutions have different views on their relationship and their obligations to each other. A national consulting group is coming in to help the two work on how their relationship should be structured.

Ask Ron Hytoff, president and chief executive at Tampa General, about how the hospital treats USF's medical school and he'll talk about how much the hospital does to help USF. Last year, Tampa General poured more than $37-million into support of USF, he said.

"We're very proud of our relationship, and we're looking forward to continuing to work closely with USF," Hytoff said Friday, the first time he has talked publicly about USF since it proposed the hospital.

But ask Dr. Stephen Klasko, dean of the USF medical school, and he'll say that the hospital's support comes mostly in payments to residents and faculty doctors for services they provide. If that money didn't go to USF, Klasko said, Tampa General would have to hire other health care workers.

"The issue is how much is invested in research and the academic enterprise, as opposed to service," Klasko said this week.

Klasko says the medical school has been hemmed in, unable to place faculty members at community hospitals, where doctors don't welcome potential competitors. Tensions between medical school and hospital, for example, contributed to the collapse of USF's anesthesiology training program for graduate medical students in 2006.

They even disagree on terms. Klasko wants Tampa to have an academic medical center. Hytoff says it already does.

"I think every academic medical center has a dialogue with their medical school partner, and it's unpleasant when it gets into the media," Hytoff said.

He decided to talk about the issue after Klasko said Tampa isn't the best place for health care. As Klasko pushed for a USF hospital, he said people diagnosed with serious illnesses often leave the state for care.

"I really believe the quality of patient care in Tampa Bay is superior," Hytoff said. "We have excellent physicians and excellent staff working to provide excellent care."

Hytoff said he was puzzled by some of Klasko's remarks. Still, he said Klasko is "doing the very best he can" and that he expects USF and Tampa General to continue to have a strong relationship.

This week, Klasko called Tampa General "a great hospital" and said he wants the two to have closer ties. His intent wasn't to knock health care in Tampa, he said, but to encourage ambition.

"Do we want to be a place that's okay, or do we want to be the kind of place that people talk about nationally?" he said. "I'm saying that we can do better & The places that get it are where the medical school and the hospital are truly together in a true strategic alliance."

A few weeks ago, Klasko had pointed out that Tampa Bay hasn't scored well in rankings by one national rating group, HealthGrades, and that Tampa General scored poorly in the group's ratings on hip and knee replacement.

Hytoff took issue with that. He criticized the HealthGrades rating and noted that U.S. News & World Report ranks Tampa General as one of the nation's best in orthopedics.

That difference also shows the difficulty for consumers in using rankings to make choices about hospital quality, said Dr. Rachel Werner, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

"No single quality measure captures everything about the quality of care at a single hospital," she said.

Rankings that look at mortality rates, for example, may be more interesting to consumers. But they also might be skewed by other factors, such as whether sicker patients are referred to that hospital. Other types of rankings may measure things more accurately  how many heart patients got aspirin, for example  but not seem as important.

[Jihme]

wow all of this would be huge for the college of medicine and the university in general!

[BULLfreak]

Heck everytime I've gone to TGH the f*cked everything up. Hell They almost cost my wife her life because they didn't know what their ass from thier hole in the ground

[Paisa el Toro]

USF needs its own hospital.  Does anyone know if Jackson Memorial in Miami has the same relationship with UM as TGH has with USF, or is Jackson Memorial UM's hospital?