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USF Closer To Creating Major Campus Hospital

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By LINDSAY PETERSON | The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 26, 2009

TAMPA - The University of South Florida is moving closer to creating a campus hospital focusing on diabetes and neuroscience.

A major campus medical center is critical not only to USF's growth but the growth of the Tampa Bay area, Health Sciences Vice President Stephen Klasko told the USF Board of Trustees this morning.

"It's either going to be USF leading the health care system….or we're going to be an afterthought," he said as he explained his plan to explore partnerships with private doctors and regional or national health care centers.

USF has begun working with Caine Brothers, health care capital advisors and investment bankers based in New York. The firm is advising the university on how to evaluate partnership offers.

The timing is critical said another advisor, Iqbal Paroo, former president of Hahnemann University in Philadelphia and CEO of several hospitals in the Hospital Corporation of America system.

"Health care research is in the process of being completely transformed" through new discoveries and technologies. But care across the Tampa Bay area is still being provided according to the older "legacy" models, Paroo said.

"What USF needs to do is begin to drive forward. It is time for USF to lead the change….and lead the legacy institutions that don't want to change."

USF President Judy Genshaft agreed. "The landscape has changed and we have to change with it."
The Tampa Bay area has all the pieces of a great health care system, but there's nothing to pull them together, said Karen Holbrook, vice president for research and innovation and former Ohio State University president.

Academic medical centers are unique because they are committed to both patient care and research, she said. "We have the pieces," the buildings, researchers and physicians. "We don't have the glue. The glue is the hospital."

Klasko lobbied lawmakers last spring to approve a plan that would allow USF to bypass the state agency that determines the need for a new hospital. But the Florida Hospital Association fought back, and state lawmakers shelved the proposal.

But he has new hope with the success of diabetes researcher Jeffrey Krischer. In July, Krischer won a $128 million National Institutes of Health grant to investigate new therapies that may arrest the progression of Type 1 diabetes, once known as juvenile diabetes. The year before he received a $169 million federal grant to study what triggers the disease.

Reporter Lindsay Peterson can be reached at (813) 259-7834.

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