San Clemente Hospital Sold; Buyer Plans Turnaround
A Tennessee company said Monday that it has acquired the only hospital in San Clemente in hopes of doubling the institution’s business and making it profitable.
NetCare Inc. purchased the money-losing 81-bed San Clemente Hospital and Medical Center after the hospital’s previous operator--the hospital industry’s troubled giant, Columbia/HCA Corp.--pulled out last month.
Michael A. Koban Jr., NetCare’s president and chief executive, said the San Clemente institution is just the sort of business his company specializes in: hospitals that are the only providers in a growing community.
The hospital provides basic acute-care services, has modest annual revenue of about $22 million, and serves only about 25% to 30% of the area’s roughly 50,000 residents. But Koban said he believes its market share can be doubled.
A lot of people in the community are turning to Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo, as well as other nearby institutions, he said.
“We thought that if we could invest in the facilities and provide staff support we could get most of the residents to stay in town for their care,” he said. He declined to give details on NetCare’s plans for the facility.
On Monday, NetCare temporarily appointed a veteran hospital executive, Karen Poole, as the San Clemente hospital’s chief executive. Poole’s first assignment is to hire a permanent chief executive within the next three months.
Columbia/HCA--the target of a large-scale government investigation into possible Medicare fraud--has been selling off chunks of its hospital empire in an attempt to scale back its operation to a manageable size. Columbia/HCA ran the hospital for three years in a joint venture with the hospital’s previous owner, Samaritan Health System of Phoenix.
NetCare purchased the hospital from Samaritan for an undisclosed amount.
Charles Welliver, an executive vice president at Samaritan, said the Phoenix company is withdrawing from operating hospitals outside Arizona. Welliver noted that the San Clemente hospital had “operated in the red” but was moving toward profitability.
NetCare, which has 2,000 employees, owns nine other hospitals, in Texas, Mississippi and Georgia. Columbia/HCA continues to operate hospitals in Huntington Beach and West Anaheim.
