Your healthcare system, Physician Group, or University is embarking on a new ambulatory care project and you have been assigned the integral task of preparing the business plan. Your plan must gain approval from exacting authorizers including senior leadership and board members. Without these approvals, your plan will stall out.
Complicating matters, you already have a demanding job, somewhat limited experience in preparing new project plans, and a tight timeline for business planning.
Let’s explore how an experienced outpatient care facility real estate developer can help.
Why business planning is a challenge in healthcare operations
Spearheading the creation of a healthcare business plan would be stressful even if it were your sole responsibility. After all, a single business plan includes:
- A complete project description
- A project schedule
- Details of what kind of medical facility is going into the space
- Projections of income and expenses as well as capital requirements
- Architectural plans
- Construction budgets
- A five-plus year projection of expected performance
It’s an exhaustive roadmap that every hospital and physician group requires to expand their healthcare network.
To tackle business planning, health systems, and physician groups typically rely on an architect, consultant, facility manager, and contractor. However, none of these resources can guide site selection, programming, determination of physician complement, cost of occupancy, or financing — leaving you with a long, complicated to-do list.
How a real estate developer can help with business plans
So, can a developer assist with business plan creation? If the developer has staff with extensive healthcare operations experience and a considerable track record of developing similar facilities, their input is definitely valuable.
NexCore is such a developer.
Our team members bring to bear 45 years of experience as well as an executive background in outpatient operations. We’re a one-stop shop for much of the data necessary to complete your business plan. Not only will we provide you with much of the data, we proffer this data — like project budget, terms of occupancy, tenant improvements, and financing — with a guarantee. Your stakeholders can rest assured we’re accountable to these projected figures.
NexCore is also a potential investor, putting a tremendous amount of capital into our projects. We only embark on such projects if we’re sure they’ll be successful. We are thoughtful and deliberate with our investments to avoid a failure for us and our clients.
Holistic healthcare business plan questions your developer can answer
Calculating your healthcare center’s tenant improvements and project budget are far from the only details a developer can help you with (that a consultant cannot). Here are just some of the questions our decades of experience in healthcare-specific real estate development have taught us to ask — and help answer — during business planning:
- Where should the site be?
- How much will the site cost?
- Is the property developable in a timely manner?
- Should you purchase or lease property?
- What are the financing options?
- How much space will each of your departments need (surgery suite, primary care, etc.)?
- What is the optimal provider complement to support the project’s strategy?
Asking the right questions and seeking the right answers results in a business plan you feel confident presenting to your senior leaders and board. In turn, these stakeholders will feel confident giving your project the green light, and your healthcare system can thrive.
Where to turn with board approval on the line
Understanding healthcare operations is critical to creating a comprehensive, successful business plan and garnering board approval. Only someone with operational expertise can grasp the square footage needs of a program and accurately predict the program ROI, as well as the overall project income and expenses.
You may be skeptical of a real estate developer’s knowledge of these operations, and we understand that. While we aren’t in the weeds like you, remember that the team at NexCore Group works exclusively with healthcare professionals developing healthcare real estate. And we have experts on our team who were once on your side as healthcare administrators themselves.
We have a vested interest in your success because we genuinely care about our partnership. We can walk the road to a board-approved business plan together for mutual success.
Learn more about a developer partnership with NexCore Group, get in touch.
Written by: Carolyn Wilson, Strategy & Planning Advisor and Tim Oliver, Director, Strategic Planning & Development