Modeling the Case for a Community's First Hospital
A City Without a Hospital
A fast-growing suburb outside a major Western US metro area is home to roughly 80,000 people and projected to approach 100,000 within a few years. Despite that growth, the city has no inpatient hospital, just a freestanding emergency department and a handful of outpatient clinics, and no surgical services at all. Determined to change that, the city partnered with a private developer to get a hospital campus built, and BA Science was engaged to provide a market strategy to help guide the project.
That's where this engagement departs from BA Science's typical health advisory work. Director of Health Strategy Derek Ortner's projects almost always originate with the health system that will ultimately own and operate the facility. Here, the client was a real estate developer, with no hospital operator yet lined up to lease or buy the finished building. The developer and the city brought Derek in at an early stage and leaned on his projections to inform and validate their plans.
Grounding the Project in Real Numbers
Derek leads BA Science's Strategic Health Advisory service, which engages health systems at the planning stage, before design begins, to help them decide what services to offer, where to offer them, and how to sustain them. That grounding shaped how he approached this project. Drawing on 15 years as a healthcare executive, Derek built out a comprehensive market analysis and provider demand model for the site, projecting patient volumes by payer mix and creating a ten-year revenue and expense outlook to estimate when the hospital could become self-sustaining. He worked with BA's Director of Programming & Planning, Kate Galpin, to translate those volume projections into physical facility requirements using her calculators, and delivered the project validation the city had asked for, presenting the findings directly to the city's Economic Development Council as an independent assessment of the site's viability.
The modeling produced a range of scenarios rather than a single answer: a minimum-viable facility of 45,000–60,000 square feet in year one, scaling through several capacity tiers, up to the largest footprint the site could physically support, a 48-bed, 100,000-square-foot hospital.
From Market Study to Design Work
Almost as soon as the modeling wrapped, the developer issued an RFP for the campus's first building: a medical office building intended to open ahead of the hospital itself. BA is currently handling design work for that building, and Derek is collaborating with the design team to maintain a continuity of strategy.
