Most Important Rx for Health Care: People

W

hat's the most important prescription for building a cluster of health- care services companies in a regional economy?
   Talented people, say experts who specialize in matching health- care company needs with the right location for doing business.
   No one knows this any better than Robin Ronne, who for 15 years specialized in attracting large employers to the Tampa Bay area. Some of his crowning successes were large health- care services firms.
   Now an independent consultant living in Brandon in East Hillsborough County, Fla., Ronne remains at ground zero of Florida's constantly expanding health- care industry. From Clearwater and Largo in Pinellas County, where medical device manufacturing is a dominant force, to Tampa and Brandon, where large medical centers and high-tech heath care dot the landscape, the greater Tampa Bay area is recognized as a national and international leader in health- care employment.
   "The state of Florida, as well as the Tampa Bay area in particular, has been considered a strong magnet for health care companies and service providers due to a critical mass of existing employers and related support services that have created and sustained the long- term development of a health services industry cluster," says Ronne. "Driven by the national and state demographics of an ever- growing aging population and the ability to provide access to a substantial pool for clinical studies and trials, Florida and the Tampa Bay area have recognized health services as an important economic development target industry cluster since 1991, and addressed the cluster's critical needs for success."
   The cluster's No. 1 need, according to Ronne, is a quality labor force. "The most important site selection criterion for health care companies is the labor force — the ability to attract, retain and retrain the most highly qualified personnel from entry level to executives," Ronne says.
   Other critical factors, he adds, are available buildings and sites that are fully vested with entitlements and offer room for expansion; a highly rated educational system including superior community colleges and universities to train health-care workers; cooperative governmental attitude at the local, regional and state levels; world- class telecommunications for both voice and data; highly reliable and cost- competitive electric power; excellent surface and air transportation; and good quality of life, including affordable cost of living for employees.
   Ronne cited recent expansion projects by WellCare Health Plans in Renaissance Park and GE Healthcare's US$50- million, 126,000-sq.-ft. (11,705-sq.-m.), all- digital heart hospital as confirmation that Tampa is taking its health services cluster to the next level.
   The GE Healthcare facility at Tampa's Pepin Heart Hospital and Research Institute is "the only one of its kind in the Southeast," says Ronne. It "will integrate clinical and IT systems to create a paperless, filmless and wireless environment where information flows seamlessly from patient administration through discharge."
   King White, principal of Trammell Crow Co. in Dallas, says his firm has seen an increase in interest in establishing nursing call centers in certain metro areas.
   "These are the call centers that are required to do various tasks. Trained nurses actually answer the calls," White says. "We study locations around the country that are good for this. We track statistics that show how many registered nurses are in every market and zip code in the country. We target the highest concentrations of nurses around the country by zip code and block."
   White notes that companies also look for low-cost locations. "The balancing act is to get them into smaller markets that aren't too little to meet the company's needs," he says. "We have identified many markets where the company can still pay reasonable nursing salaries."
   Among those markets are Phoenix, San Antonio, Seattle, Tampa and Nashville, White says. Emerging markets for this type of call center, he adds, are Louisville, Little Rock, Charlotte, Kansas City and St. Louis.