UF Health president on the future of Flagler Hospital following the acquisition (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — Dr. David Nelson, senior vice president for health affairs at UF and president of UF Health (pictured above), was one of several executives at Wednesday’s event celebrating the acquisition of Flagler Health+ and its rebranding to UF Health St. Johns.
As someone who helped guide the new partnership, Nelson said one of his main goals is to make the transition so smooth that most patients won’t notice any obvious changes other than signage.
But he does want them eventually to find that the move to UF Health creates better overall care for the community.
After Wednesday’s event, he talked to the Business Journal about the future of the UF Health St. Johns system.
How does UF Health Flagler Hospital fit into the network of UF Health hospitals, especially in the Jacksonville area?
I think if you were to look where UF Health has current facilities, it’s Gainesville, Jacksonville, expanding north to a new north campus … we also have a partnership with Halifax Hospital in Daytona.
If you laid out an I-75 map and an I-95 map you would notice a big gap called St. Johns County. So from a population health management, which is where you can make the most opportunity to impact people’s health by bringing populations together and offering a full line of services, for us as a system, St. Johns County is critical. Flagler Health represents that community hospital, that community presence that is the right partner.
Even before the most recent process, the public was very aware that UF Health and Flagler were pursuing opportunities to open up a new campus together in St. Johns County in Durbin Park. So this is not a brand new thing that just happened overnight. We’ve been looking for a partner in St. Johns County from the University of Florida standpoint, and Flagler has been looking for a partner to help bring in resources to allow them to head north in St. Johns.
Has the vision of the Durbin Park hospital changed with the acquisition of Flagler Health+?
I think the only that’s changed is a sense of immediacy.
I think you’re going to see very quick progress in Durbin Park on an acute care hospital, on medical office buildings, surgery center and a whole series of other offerings that are coming from engagement with community members and other partners.
I think the Durbin Park campus is still on target for, in general, an acute care facility as well as a series of other standard offerings in outpatient health care as well as outpatient surgical health care.
With Flagler Hospital joining the UF Health system, is it going to remain a general hospital?
I’ll call it a community hospital.
We have two big academic campuses where basic translational science is done, where most of our training programs are based, we’ve got Gainesville and Jacksonville.
We’ve got community hospitals down in Lake and Sumter counties … so we understand the need to allow community hospitals to maintain their local connections and identities. So nothing’s going to change about the type of mission in the relationship with the community. It’s got a different name (UF Health Flagler Hospital) and it has different kind of focus from the university side, but it’ll maintain the same high-quality connectivity to the community.
Do you think there will be more opportunities for types of specialty care at Flagler Hospital going forward?
One of the things we’ve learned through partnerships with (groups like Halifax) is that we can recruit better physicians, especially sub-specialists when you’ve got that UF connection.
I think we’ll be able to allow this community to have better doctors living in the community and working for this health care system.
We want to make it a seamless transition to get a referral to either Gainesville or Jacksonville based on the needs when the local physicians are asking for help for their patients.
Flagler Health+ has been expanding into Flagler County. Will UF Health follow that trend?
We’ve been very public with our interest in Palm Coast.
Palm Coast, to us, becomes a very important community to be able to offer services across populations.
We’re really interested in population health. If you’re going to manage a large population, you need to have physicians, hospitals, surgery centers, lab draws, imaging. You need to be able to have people stay locally and get 99% of their care.
What about all the ancillary service centers that Flagler Health+ has run? Do you plan to keep those open?
All integrated and you’ll see the name UF Health St. Johns at Nocatee. You’ll see those kind of take on the brand, keep their local flavor, especially some of those outpatient clinics.