A joint venture involving St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center and an orthopedic surgeon group is proposing a $26.5 million, 33,000-square-foot orthopedic and pain ambulatory surgery center in Hartford.
St. Francis Hospital’s proposed joint venture with Lighthouse Surgery Holdings LLC, known as Woodland Surgery Center, plans to build the facility at 129 Woodland St. It would house six operating rooms, a procedure room, and rehabilitation and physician space, according to a Certificate of Need (CON) application filed with the state Office of Health Care Access.
Work would begin once the project receives approval from the Office of Health Care Access, with planned occupancy in June 2019. The site, across Woodland from the main hospital campus near Ashley Street, includes a unoccupied daycare and apartment buildings that will be demolished.
St. Francis will own 35 percent of the joint venture, with 65 percent held by Lighthouse Surgery Holdings, which was established by independent orthopedic surgeons, pain specialists and anesthesiologists to manage the new facility. The parties began discussing the surgery center late last year.
St. Francis will close its four operating room SurgiCare, an outpatient surgery center at 500 Blue Hills Ave. in Hartford, effectively decreasing St. Francis’ available surgical capacity, but it will continue to offer the same services proposed for the Woodland Surgery Center, the CON says.
St. Francis would fund $13.6 million of the surgery center, with the Woodland Surgery Center joint venture funding $12.9 million.
The proposal estimates that outpatient joint replacements in the Hartford area will increase 227.1 percent in 10 years and that outpatient sports medicine and spine volumes will rise by 43.9 percent and 27.5 percent, respectively.
The new surgical center will offer some total joint replacement surgeries as outpatient procedures. Currently, orthopedic ambulatory surgery and pain treatments are provided at St. Francis and SurgiCare, but attempting to shift orthopedic cases to SurgiCare is not feasible, the CON says, noting current operating rooms at St. Francis and SurgiCare were never designed with new equipment in mind and it has become financially infeasible to retrofit each.
St. Francis surgeons recently started shifting joint replacement cases to outpatient operating rooms at the hospital, when appropriate, but because the cases are more complex than routine outpatient surgery performed there, sharing space hurts efficiency, the CON says.
A dedicated ASC “will ultimately improve the efficiency of the cases and allow for increasing transition of inpatient joint procedures to the outpatient arena,” the CON says. “The result will be quicker recovery times, better outcomes and lower cost procedures.”
The facility would follow other orthopedic projects in the state recently, including Hartford HealthCare’s new Bone & Joint Institute at Hartford Hospital that opened in January. On Monday, Stamford Health and Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) of New York City opened a 40,000-square-foot orthopedic inpatient surgical unit at Stamford Hospital.