Villages Provide One-Stop Healthcare for Consumers

By incorporating increased collaboration and coordinated care, proponents of healthcare "villages" say the concept is the wave of the future—both from a consumer and business standpoint.

The healthcare village is designed as a one-stop healthcare destination where consumers are provided easily accessible outpatient and preventive wellness services.

"Think of it in terms of an upscale shopping mall, but only with healthcare services, and the wellness center is basically like the anchor tenant—the major department store," says Donna Jarmusz, senior vice president of Alter+Care, a healthcare real estate company that works with healthcare providers around the globe to develop healthcare villages.

"That generates a lot of visibility, a lot of high traffic, because people join the wellness center as members and they are frequenting it two or three times a week. That creates a lot of pedestrian traffic for the other services that may be in the same location."

And the idea is catching on: From Wisconsin to Dubai, healthcare villages are cropping up all over the world.

"It's really taken off from a global perspective, it's not just a U.S. concept," Jarmusz says, noting that having a stake in a healthcare village abroad helps some U.S. organizations expand their brand.

For example, Harvard has ties with Dubai Healthcare City (DHCC). The organization now known as Partners Harvard Medical International was founded originally as Harvard Medical International, a self-supporting subsidiary of Harvard University and Harvard Medical School. PHMI has "played a significant role" in the development of Dubai's Healthcare City and other major initiatives of the Government of Dubai, according to the DHCC's Web site.

"It benefits them because it gives them another source of revenue, another way to provide healthcare services to more people, and it benefits the foreign countries because they don't have to internally develop that expertise, they can import it from our country," she adds.

Jarmusz says that the easy accessibility of healthcare villages aligns with the business strategy of attracting consumers by creating a positive "experience." Patients visiting a healthcare village can meet with their physicians, then very easily have lab work completed, pick up prescriptions, buy their eyeglasses, or even attend educational wellness classes?and do it all within walking distance.

"Consumers have become very accustomed to having an experience—that whole ambiance to make it very positive and enjoyable," Jarmusz says. "Healthcare is just now really starting to embrace this concept. Healthcare providers want to penetrate new market areas, and they want to have their services closer to where people work and live, and a healthcare village can really accomplish that for them."

But it is not just consumers who benefit from the village concept. Having a wide variety of healthcare services—including urgent care, rehabilitation, and prescriptions—in one complex benefits physicians as well.

"Physicians like to have their offices in these healthcare villages, because everything they need and their patients need are right there," Jarmusz says.

And although the medical village concept has raised some concern among physicians in regards to payments (as Kirk Mathews, MBA, recently wrote on HCPro, Inc.'s hospitalist blog), in some cases the villages provide physicians and hospitals with economic alignment opportunities as well.

For example, if a physician has an office in a building that is part of a healthcare village where there is also an ambulatory service center, that physician or that practice may be partnering with the hospital in a joint venture for the center, Jarmusz says.

"That gives the physicians an opportunity to increase their revenue, as well as providing an opportunity for the physicians and the hospital to work together more cooperatively . . . ultimately providing a higher quality product or service for the consumer."

Jarmusz says the simple, strategic delineation of healthcare services that a healthcare village affords can save providers in the long run. For example, some of the healthcare villages have freestanding emergency departments or urgent care centers where patients with minor emergencies can go, rather than wasting the time and resources of a major emergency room that can be used strictly for major injuries.

By moving some of those minor emergencies to an urgent care center or a freestanding emergency department that is part of a healthcare village is one example of how the village concept cuts down the cost of medical care, Jarmusz says.

"The cost of healthcare has skyrocketed, so healthcare providers are trying to find different ways to provide high quality healthcare services at a lower cost," she says. "Healthcare providers can provide services more economically in this environment than they can when they are providing the same outpatient services on their campuses where they have a lot of high overhead and expenses."