Suburban Hospital Healthcare System is joining the Johns Hopkins Health System Corp.’s family, but its soon-to-be parent company will not have much say in getting its much-needed expansion approved and funded.
On April 24, Suburban Hospital’s board of trustees expressed its intent for Suburban to join Johns Hopkins, as did the Hopkins board on April 13. After due diligence takes place, the Bethesda health system is expected to become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Johns Hopkins in the early fall.
The proposed transaction will not involve financial exchanges.
“The plans we have had to improve this campus -- which hasn’t really had a major clinical improvement in the past 30 years -- are important to the residents of the community and Hopkins fully supports that plan,” said Brian Gragnolati, president and CEO of SHHS.
The plan to expand his 238-bed hospital, which has annual admissions of 15,000, currently sits in front of Montgomery County’s zoning board.
Gragnolati was asked by a staff member if the affiliation with Johns Hopkins will make the process move more quickly. “I said this affiliation really has nothing to do with the plans that are before the zoning board of appeals right now. Quite frankly they have a process we need to follow and that really isn’t influenced one way or another and I don’t see this [combination] affecting it.”
He noted that growth has been going up in Suburban’s emergency department and Sunday was the busiest day he has ever seen in the department.
“It’s an interesting time of year where everything is yellow. Clearly upper respiratory problems are prevalent. The swine flu has gotten citizens concerned,” said Gragnolati, who has been on the e-mail chain with the state and Centers for Disease Control all weekend about the topic. “That’s why the building project is so important to us, so that the kinds of facilities are there and ready when the community needs us and is why the integration with Hopkins is so important.” He said it is unclear on the timeline for the approvals but is hoping that “we will see something soon.”
The project in front of the zoning board involves facilities replacement, a parking garage, a patient care addition to the campus’ existing building, private patient rooms, operating rooms and redoing a lot of the circulation on the campus.
The hospital is trying to improve access to the emergency department by creating a new main entrance. He stressed that the hospital is not combining with Johns Hopkins due to financial difficulties.
“The combination was not an economic transaction. We have been pretty careful stewards of our financial resources, and funding for this plan will come out of three sources.” Those include the reserves the organization has, addition debt the hospital will incur and the third -- which he calls the most important -- is fundraising. This year the hospital got a record $6.5 million bequest from the estate of Betty Phillips to support hospital facility projects. Through the combination, Suburban Hospital will keep its name and leadership and day-to-day operations are not expected to change. The plan calls for SHHS to keep its voluntary medical staff and physician organization, Premier Physician Group. In addition, SHHS would operate under the direction of the JHHS governance structure in the same way as The Johns Hopkins Hospital, Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center and Howard County General Hospital. “The work Suburban will do together with Johns Hopkins will be building on years of partnerships we’ve already had in place in such areas as diabetes and cardiac care. Ultimately I think that the organizations together will begin to navigate changes with health care reform.” In 2006, the two institutions and the National Institutes of Health collaborated to develop the NIH Heart Center at Suburban Hospital, offering advanced cardiovascular specialty care, including cardiac surgery. Suburban Hospital has been serving Montgomery County and the surrounding region since 1943.