Economy & Economic Development  March 19, 2015

UCHealth forging partnership with Adeptus Health?

UCHealth’s Wednesday announcement of plans to build a Longmont hospital comes amid continued rapid expansion of the 3-year-old system formed by the merger of University of Colorado Hospital and Poudre Valley Health, expansion that may even include partnerships in soon-to-be-built hospitals in Broomfield and Colorado Springs.

Articles of Organization were filed earlier this month with the Colorado Secretary of State’s office for new business entities called UCHealth Broomfield Hospital LLC, UCHealth Colorado Springs Hospital LLC, and UCHealth Partners LLC.

All three entities list their principal office addresses as 2941 S. Lake Vista Dr., Suite 200, Lewisville, Texas – the address of fast-growing Adeptus Health (NYSE: ADPT). BizWest reported last month that Adeptus, parent company of First Choice Emergency Room, is building a new hospital in Broomfield’s Arista development off of U.S. Highway 36. Work is set to begin there any day, while Adeptus also has plans to build a new hospital in Colorado Springs.

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Adeptus officials and developers working on the Broomfield hospital could not be reached Thursday. UCHealth media relations director Dan Weaver neither confirmed nor denied that UCHealth was involved with the two Adeptus hospitals.

“I don’t really have any information there for you,” said Weaver, who did say that UCHealth is not partnering with another system on the Longmont hospital.

Adeptus recently partnered with another health-care system, Dignity Health, to open a small hospital in the Phoenix area.

If Adeptus is indeed partnering in some way with UCHealth in Broomfield and Colorado Springs, it would link the out-of-state company with one of Colorado’s largest systems as it works to gain a foothold locally.

Terry West, an analyst with IHS, said the onslaught of new hospital construction nationwide over the past decade has grown out of pressures on hospital systems to grow due to things like an aging population, as well as the need to simply update aging facilities. Partnering with other systems on new hospitals is a way to both beef up resources and mitigate risk.

“The motivation behind it is you now have a larger capital base and larger base of resources to face the market with,” West said. “It costs an awful lot of money to build a new hospital. We’re talking about a really high-cost venture. If you can spread the cost of that venture over multiple parties, it sort of lowers risk a bit.”

The Broomfield hospital is a planned 52-bed general hospital that is expected to include an emergency room and both in-patient and out-patient surgical services. The Colorado Springs facility will be smaller.

But even without the hospitals, Adeptus has made its own aggressive push into Colorado with its First Choice Emergency Rooms. In recent years, FCER has opened eight standalone emergency rooms in the Denver metro area, including Broomfield and Firestone, in addition to four in the Colorado Springs area.

Another FCER is making its way through the entitlement process with Longmont’s planning department. That 6,983-square-foot facility is planned for the northwest corner of 21st and Main streets on the site of two buildings that now house a Taco Don Jose’s restaurant and a Game Force store, along with a vacant former Elevations Credit Union branch. Demolition of those two buildings is expected to begin within the next few months once new locations for Game Force and Taco Don Jose’s are found, said Sullivan Hayes broker Mike DePalma, who does the leasing for the Horizon Park Shopping Center of which the buildings are a part.

UCHealth has been a major player in Northern Colorado since its inception. Formed in 2012, it operates University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora, Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland and Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs. That’s in addition to several clinics in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska. Locally, the health system has various clinics and facilities in Fort Collins, Greeley, Windsor and Boulder. In January, UCHealth also closed on the purchase of Longmont Clinic and its satellite campus, the Carbon Valley Medical Center.

UCHealth’s Longmont hospital is slated for 50 to 75 beds at a cost of $100 million to $125 million, and will include an intensive-care unit, operating rooms, emergency room, cardiology services and a birth center. Longmont mayor pro tem Brian Bagley said Wednesday that a UCHealth official told him that the new Longmont hospital would be located in east Longmont somewhere off of Highway 119.

UCHealth in 2012 purchased 66 acres of land in developer McWhinney’s North Park development in Broomfield on Highway 7 just west of Interstate 25. UCHealth officials said at the time their plan was to build some sort of medical campus there, the makeup of which was yet to be determined. Weaver said that location is still a long-term play, and that UCHealth still has no specific plans or dateline for building there.


The blue points on the map show locations where Adeptus Health company First Choice Emergency Room has facilities along the Front Range. The red points mark UCHealth’s hospitals. (Steve Miller/BizWest)

UCHealth’s Wednesday announcement of plans to build a Longmont hospital comes amid continued rapid expansion of the 3-year-old system formed by the merger of University of Colorado Hospital and Poudre Valley Health, expansion that may even include partnerships in soon-to-be-built hospitals in Broomfield and Colorado Springs.

Articles of Organization were filed earlier this month with the Colorado Secretary of State’s office for new business entities called UCHealth Broomfield Hospital LLC, UCHealth Colorado Springs Hospital LLC, and UCHealth Partners LLC.

All three entities list their principal office addresses as 2941 S. Lake Vista Dr., Suite 200, Lewisville, Texas – the…

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