30+ Years in Operation Winner: CoxHealth

With development of a patient tower in Springfield underway and planned upgrades to the newly rebranded Cox Medical Center Branson on the way, the economic benefits provided by CoxHealth are especially visible these days.

Add the fact the health system – which with its 2012 purchase of Skaggs Regional Medical Center now has direct health oversight of two southwest Missouri cities – employs roughly 10,100 regionally, and the nonprofit’s impact is clear.

In Springfield, CoxHealth broke ground in May on a 310,000-square-foot addition to Cox South, a nine-story patient tower carrying a $130 million price tag. The tower, which has a tentative completion date of Thanksgiving 2014, would initially house a women’s and children’s hospital and a neuroscience center, and include room for expansion down the road.

“You can look at a multiplier of what $130 million in construction can do in terms of jobs and impact on the economy. I’ve heard numbers that you can usually multiply that by three or four or fivefold to get the economic impact,” CoxHealth President and CEO Steve Edwards says.

CoxHealth went to the bond market in April, and sold out a $200 million issuance within the first hour of sales. Edwards says some $30 million of that funding is being funneled into the Branson market for improvements to the former Skaggs hospital.

“It’s pretty clear that Cox Branson, formerly Skaggs, could not grow because of access to capital,” Edwards says. “As they’ve come under our bigger umbrella, they had almost immediate access to capital on the bond market.”

Edwards says CoxHealth is finalizing plans to build a three-story wing attached to the Branson hospital, which he says likely would be built on the same construction timeline as the Springfield tower. The Branson project would create a new emergency department, intensive care unit, an observation unit and a third-floor shell with the potential for about 18 inpatient beds.

“First and foremost, these things can’t work without the community support, and the Branson community seems to really embrace this,” Edwards says. “The jobs associated with construction and growth and new employment down there, I don’t think would have happened unless they had a partner.”

The purchase of Skaggs brought about 1,200 employees to CoxHealth. The Springfield health system also is seeking to hire about 25 physicians in various specialties during the next three years for Cox Medical Center Branson, a move Edwards notes as key.

“You can change signs and do the kind of conspicuous things [but] it’s the real integration of practices that is where you have to roll up your sleeves. Physician recruiting is probably our most important element to work on right now,” he says. “We just completed our physician manpower study, and through internal mechanisms, approved our plan, so we now have the recruitment in full speed for the physicians we need to augment and grow that medical staff.”

On a larger scale, Edwards points to projects by both CoxHealth and Mercy, noting hospital construction has helped Springfield to weather uncertain economic waters better than other areas of the country.

“I can only imagine that doing this now will help us even further,” he says of the Springfield and Branson project.

CoxHealth, which opened for business on Thanksgiving Day 1906 as Burge Deaconess Hospital, posted 2012 gross revenues of $2.45 billion, representing three-year growth of about 20 percent. Edwards says net revenues this year should amount to about $1.1 billion and improve to $1.35 billion in 2014.

“If we charge $1, but we only collect 30 cents, the net revenue would be the 30 cents,” Edwards says. “That’s the money we actually collect, and then take our expenses out of that, and that’s our bottom line. That’s our profit.”[[In-content Ad]]