By: Hadassa Kalatizadeh
On Friday, Maimonides Medical Center broke ground to make way for a new, standalone emergency department in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighborhood. The bold endeavor comes despite lower-than-average visits to ERs across the city as well as nationally.
As reported by Crain’s NY, the Borough Park–based hospital has plans to spend $18.6 million to build an emergency department, spanning 15,000 square feet at the site of the former Victory Memorial Hospital building. In 2019, Maimonides inked a 10-year sublease agreeing to pay Northwell Health $609,000 a year for the space, which Northwell leases from a Borough Park limited liability real estate company.
Maimonides CEO Kenneth Gibbs said they did not let the Coronavirus pandemic change their plans for the project, despite the fact that the pandemic led to a significant drop in visits to emergency-rooms across the country. The decline in visits to ERs has not yet corrected itself, experts say.
Prior to the pandemic, Maimonides had estimated 16,000 patients visiting the new emergency department during the first year, bringing in roughly $19.6 million in revenue, with an operating profit of about $3.8 million. A Maimonides spokesman said it has not repeated the research to update the estimate. “We still have conviction on demand in the community,” Gibbs said. “The ramp up will be slower, is our expectation.”
In 2020, the emergency room now at Maimonides’ Borough Park facility, some 2 miles away from where the new emergency department will be, reported tens of thousands of fewer patients than expected, as per financial filings. The first quarter of 2021 also had several hundred fewer emergency visits than budgeted. ER visit declines have been widespread in the U.S. since the pandemic. Emergency room visits made up just 9 percent of medical claims in NYS in 2020, down from around 10.3% in 2019, as per data compiled for Crain’s by the nonprofit Fair Health.
Andrew Snyder, chief medical officer at Midtown health care management consultancy Cope Health Solutions, said the downward trend is likely to reverse itself by the time Maimonides’ freestanding emergency department is ready to open. As per Crain’s, Snyder expressed optimism that ER volume would rebound by this fall and winter, reasoning that summer is normally the lightest season for emergency departments. “Things people can walk into tend to fill up,” Snyder said.
Gibbs reiterated the sentiment adding that there will always be a need for emergency departments, particularly in less accessible neighborhoods like Bay Ridge. “This is about increasing access in a neighborhood like that, that can be a little more isolated,” Gibbs said.
