USF Hopes To Take Lead With Campus Hospital

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

Having a major medical center on the campus is critical not only to USF's growth but also the growth of the Tampa Bay area, Health Sciences Vice President Stephen Klasko told the USF Board of Trustees on Thursday.

"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 advisers 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 adviser, 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 Bay area is still being provided according to the older "legacy" models, Paroo said.

"It is time for USF to lead the change ... and lead the legacy institutions that don't want to change," he said.

USF President Judy Genshaft agreed, saying, "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 different because they are committed to both patient care and research, she said. "We have the pieces," the researchers, physicians and buildings. "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 Klasko has new hope with the success of diabetes researcher Jeffrey Krischer. In July, Krischer won a $128 million grant to investigate therapies that may arrest the progression of Type 1 diabetes.