SUNY receives seven proposals to buy LICH

The State University of New York (SUNY) has received seven responses to their May 1 request for “expressions of interest from qualified parties who could provide health care services, including operation of an acute care hospital, at or around the Long Island College Hospital (LICH) site).”

The seven proposals, made available this week on SUNY’s website, come from groups as diverse as various owners and operators of other health care facilities around the country, to a real estate investor and developer.

Their suggestions range from maintaining LICH as is or as acute care or specialized care facilities to selling off and leasing part of the property in order to fund an acute care hospital and emergency department.

No names were attached to the RFIs, but six out of the seven items contained detailed summaries of the suitors’ proposed plans for LICH, as further summarized below:

1. Suitor #1 is a for-profit entity and its public charity. They suggest purchasing LICH and all of its assets via a real estate investment trust, then leasing the space to a hospital operator, which would maintain it as “an acute care hospital with an open and accessible emergency department.” This suitor also suggests maintaining community benefit and charity care contingent on “occurrences, facts, or circumstances” connected to federal and state health care reform and reimbursement coverage changes.
2. Suitor #2 is a real estate investor and developer proposes selling or developing “smaller non-core properties” and “redeveloping the rest of these properties into residential apartment buildings” — all of which would be vacant or demolished by the time of purchase. SUNY would continue to maintain the health care services in the remaining “core properties.”
3. Suitor #3 proposes two options: (1) convert LICH into a select-function hospital care delivery system with a home visitation service and essential outpatient services (primary and specialty care, emergency department and ambulance services, ambulatory surgery, rehabilitation therapy, mental health services, and prenatal family planning), with in-hospital services continued via management agreement with another Brooklyn hospital; and (2) the above, but with the home visitation service supplementing inpatient services with full home-care and outpatient services.
4. Suitor #4 proposes teaming up with an acute care hospital and possibly other health organizations to create a multi-provider network of resources “at or around LICH.”  This would include a 100-bed long-term care hospital on two floors of the Fuller Pavilion, leased by a limited liability company. This proposal would require around 18 months of construction improvements before opening in November 2014.
5. Suitor #5 proposes an extended ambulatory care facility along with radiology and related services, all in a single Center at 349 Henry Street. Suitor #5 requests, among other things, support for two years of operating losses/losing money.
6. Suitor #6 proposes selling LICH real estate to a real estate coalition, leasing part of the land to a community hospital operator with a buyback provision, and creating another “coalition” of organizations and individuals to brainstorm and enact an “innovative, focused and patient-centric solution.”
7. Suitor #7 proposed managing LICH, but did not provide other details.