NED LAMONT: THE INTERVIEW
SUCCESSION PLANNING
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OCTOBER 1, 2018 | VOL. 54, No. 40
YOUR ONLY SOURCE FOR REGIONAL BUSINESS NEWS
Hospitals increasingly relying on donors to meet costs
Selling, not renting
BY KEVIN ZIMMERMAN kzimmerman@westfairinc.com
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RMS TRYING SOMETHING NEW WITH AINSLIE SQUARE DEVELOPMENT
Randy Salvatore. Photo by Kevin Zimmerman.
BY KEVIN ZIMMERMAN kzimmerman@westfairinc.com
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ith his Ainslie Square development in Stamford, RMS Cos. founder and CEO Randy Salvatore is taking something of a gamble. Not in the sense that he’s undertaking such a development, per se — the Stamford-based RMS has had plenty of projects in the city — but with the way he’s doing it: Ainslie Square’s 37 townhouses and 25 single-family detached houses are being marketed for sale, something Salvatore said flies in the face of what’s generally happening around the state. “There’s a lot of building going on in Stamford,” he said, “but there’s not much that’s for sale. It’s primarily a rental market in Connecticut in
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general.” Salvatore said he was familiar with the 4.5-acre property at 159 Colonial Road adjacent to Congregation Agudath Sholom, but had assumed the synagogue had its own plans for the long-underused land — home to a school building and several baseball fields that “hadn’t been used for years.” As it turned out, the synagogue did have plans for the land: Selling it. “They did a very selective marketing effort,” Salvatore said. “They made it clear that it was very important that whatever came here be complementary to them.” RMS ultimately won approval last year with its $6.2 million offer. The school building was demolished over the winter, with construction beginning shortly afterward. » SELLING
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ith ongoing cuts in government aid, hospitals and other health care organizations are increasingly looking to philanthropy to fund new facilities, services — and even personnel. “When I arrived here in the late ’90s, charitable contributions were a nice thing to have — an extra source of revenue that could provide for extra resources for the hospital,” said Steve Jakab, president of the Bridgeport Hospital Foundation. “Nineteen years later, philanthropy is a must-have. It’s a strategic, financial imperative for hospitals and health systems everywhere.” “Hospitals and health care systems are certainly feeling pressure from a lack of financial reimbursement,” Greenwich Hospital COO Diane Kelly said. “Often payments are delayed or are less than what the treatment or service cost us.” At issue are both Connecticut’s controversial hospital tax and the practices of the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), whose proposed changes to its 2019 physician fee schedule for Medicare would include a reduction in Medicare reimbursement for new drugs from wholesale acquisition cost, and alter the Merit-based Incentive Performance System. Such organizations as the American Medical Association, the American College of Rheumatology, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American College of Physicians have objected to the CMS move to create a flat payment for all visits — regardless of the complexity of the case — by reducing four levels of office visits, along with their successively higher rates, into one flat rate. » HOSPITALS
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