Florida Phoenix
Florida State University (FSU) has been given the green light by the Board of Governors (BOG) to issue $414 million in bonds to finance a new hospital in Panama City Beach as it brands its presence in Northwest Florida as FSU Health.
The FSU Board of Trustees approved the proposal hours before the BOG gave final approval.
Project planning and design have not been completed but BOG documents show that the project — including design, construction and equipment for a five-floor, 340,000 square foot facility — is projected to total $328 million.
The Panama City Beach hospital will initially open with 80 beds and four operating rooms to support orthopedic surgery, otolaryngology, gynecology, and general surgery. FSU Health in Panama City’s footprint will eventually be able to accommodate up to 600 beds.
The hospital will be built on an undeveloped 18-acre parcel of land donated by The St. Joe Co. adjacent to a new urgent care facility that Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare (TMH) built called TMH Physician Partners and Urgent Care facility.
Documents show FSU intends to enter into a long-term lease and management agreement with TMH to manage day-to-day operations. TMH will make lease payments to FSU in an amount greater than or equal to the annual debt service of the bonds.
The approval comes as FSU and TMH, which have been operating under a memo of understanding, are at odds over the future of a city of Tallahassee-owned hospital and whether it should be transitioned into an academic teaching institution as part of FSU or continue to be run by TMH, which has a long term-lease with the city to manage the facility.
Hospital administrator and Board of Governors member Alan Levine said he normally doesn’t involve himself in local disputes but took offense at TMH CEO Mark O’Bryant’s comments to the local newspaper about the dispute.
O’Bryant told the Tallahassee Democrat that TMH is community-based and that its board comprises local residents. By contrast, he said, FSU is governed by an appointed board whose members are not local.
When asked whether FSU was trying to emulate the University of Florida (UF), which operates its health care facilities in Gainesville and Jacksonville under the UF Health moniker, O’Bryant told the paper: “I’m not sure that’s the model you want. They don’t really focus as much on the local community over there because they have a different mission. Their mission is for more academic research. So if you think about the whole population, people should be concerned.”
Levine, who is Chair, President and CEO of Ballad Health, said he “takes great offense to that comment.”
Levine told the BOG he compared charity and Medicaid care between UF Health and TMH and discovered that UF has three times as many Medicaid patients as TMH, with a 15% caseload versus 5%, respectively. Additionally, UF Health offers a financial assistance policy to provide charity care to people who earn 200% or less of the federal poverty level. TMH’s financial assistance policy is set at 150% of the FPL.
“I don’t think it’s fair. If you were to go to Jacksonville or go to Gainesville and ask people whether or not our academic medical center cares about the local community and that’s not what drives decisions they make, then you don’t know much about academic medical centers,” Levine said.
He called O’Bryant’s comments “uneducated” and said, “I do think something strong needs to be said to respond to that.”
Levine offered this unsolicited advice: “FSU gets to decide who its partners are but I would strongly encourage their partner here in Tallahassee to rethink their position on that because it’s not true.”
___
Christine Sexton reporting. Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: [email protected]
