HEALTHCARE
RETAIL THERAPY The healthcare sector takes a page from a different market sector in order to create facilities that better serve the consumer By JESSE A. MILLARD
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here is no question that the healthcare industry is in the midst of an ongoing transformation as business models shift towards keeping patients well and technological advances shake things up with new systems, procedures and treatments. Healthcare facilities are aging, which has made renovations commonplace, and healthcare providers are finding new ways to meet the patients where they live and work through outpatient facilities. In 2015, the U.S. spent a collective $3.2 trillion on healthcare, with about $9,990 of that going towards each individual, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The way developers build facilities for the healthcare industry is changing dramatically and those changes translate into big bucks. More than $42 billion was spent in January 2018 alone on healthcare construction in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Arizona is certainly getting its share of the healthcare construction sector’s economic pie as developers renovate old buildings and build new healthcare facilities across the state and the Valley. And with the increased demand comes an increase in regulations and expectations as new projects must meet modern healthcare needs — from being accessible to the patients to keeping up with the latest technological advances.
32 | May-June 2018
HEALTHCARE COMES TO YOU Even before the Affordable Care Act brought a focus on reducing costs and making healthcare more efficient by focusing on keeping patients healthy instead of treating them when they’re sick, healthcare providers knew they’d have to transition to wellness care models. With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, providers started to focus on keeping everyone healthy before they become sick and need care in the emergency room or hospital, where it’s the most expensive. To keep patients healthy, providers have had to take the initiative of being proactive and making it easier for the patients to get treatment, says Julie Johnson, principal at Avison Young. Providers focused on keeping people healthy by moving healthcare away from the hospitals and into their neighborhoods, along with being more focused on primary care from physicians and urgent care clinics, Johnson says. “That’s when the shift started towards providing healthcare that is not focused on making the hospital the center of the universe,” Johnson says. “Very often, there was a focus on keeping the doctors happy. Hospitals are now shifting toward more patientcentric healthcare rather than hospitalcentric or physician-centric healthcare.” In order to accomplish this, there has to be a lot of real estate involved,
Johnson says. Providers started developing new facilities to supply spaces for the number of physicians who were leaving private practice to become employees, Johnson says. And more urgent care facilities have been added along with new outpatient facilities, she says. There’s also been the rise of microhospitals to help cut costs. Surgeries are increasingly becoming an outpatient procedure, Johnson says, so facilities were needed to provide patients a space when they only need to stay one night at the hospital after a procedure. These micro-hospitals are smaller than your larger facilities and help lower both the costs and the possibility of exposure to infections that can happen in hospitals, Johnson says. As providers implement the strategy of adding more urgent care and outpatient facilities, they have also been taking a page from retail when it comes to signage. It’s hard to miss the growing number of flashy neon signs for urgent care facilities and the addition of these healthcare spaces in what were once traditional retail shopping strip malls. These spaces are being added near big box retail stores and within short distances of pharmacies. The idea is to attract the patients within the community before they need help at a hospital or some other healthcare facility. “Because retailers are trying to