Ex-Official Plans to Buy Tustin Hospital : Investment: Healthcare Medical Center has accumulated about $15 million in losses. The new owner has plans for improving its financial picture.

HealthCare International is selling its money-losing 203-bed hospital here to Concept Health Care, a company owned by a former administrator of the hospital.

Michael Drobot, owner of Concept Health Care of Kirkland, Wash., said the final sale price is still being negotiated but that it is expected to be between $30 million and $40 million.

Drobot assumed management of the hospital, Healthcare Medical Center of Tustin, Thursday. He said his company will begin leasing the facility April 1 and that acquisition of the hospital and the land involved will be completed by July 1. The hospital will be renamed Concept Medical Center of Tustin.

Drobot said he is familiar with the hospital, formerly known as Tustin Community Hospital, having worked there as an administrator from 1980 to 1984. Drobot bought the hospital in 1984 from a physician group, then resold it soon after to HealthCare International of Austin, Tex.

Healthcare International is in financial difficulty, and it recently began selling its four critical care hospitals; the others are in Honolulu, Memphis and New Orleans.

After it bought the Tustin hospital, Healthcare International invested between $10 million and $12 million to renovate it and to build a four-story medical office building, Drobot said. The hospital did not attract enough patients to pay off the resulting debt, however. When the physicians who belonged to the former group that owned the hospital retired, he said, they were not replaced by new staff physicians.

As a result, the hospital has recently been able to fill only about 25% of its beds, down from 50% two years ago, said Steve Porter, hospital executive director. The hospital accumulated about $15 million in losses, Drobot said.

To help the hospital’s financial picture, the new management plans to create “ownership opportunities for physicians” and to aggressively court health maintenance and preferred provider organizations, Porter said.

HealthCare International, by contrast, was opposed to contracting with managed-care organizations and did not realize their growing influence in the Southern California health care market, Porter said.

Porter will stay on as chief administrator at the facility. He said he hopes to attract about 100 physicians for a limited partnership in which they would have a 70% ownership interest. Drobot would own the remaining 30% and act as general partner. The partnership, he said, would buy the hospital and lease it to Concept Health Care, which would manage it.

In addition, Drobot said he intends to build another medical office building on property next to the hospital that he has an option to buy. He proposes building a 100,000-square-foot building that, he said, he plans to sell to the roughly 80 physicians who would occupy space there.