Empowering Primary Care: Real Estate Innovation for Value-Based Health Care
Empowering Primary Care: Real Estate Innovation for Value-Based Health Care
In this episode of the Health Care Real Estate Advisor podcast, host Joel Swider chats with Dr. Leonard Fromer, President of Healthcare Initiatives at Turner Impact Capital. Dr. Fromer shares his journey from family physician to health care innovation and explains how his firm uses market-driven strategies to design and build health care facilities in underserved communities. The discussion highlights the shift toward value-based care—focusing on quality, prevention, patient experience, and provider well-being—and dives into the challenges and opportunities of creating sustainable, patient-centered real estate infrastructure.
Podcast Participants

Joel Swider
Hall Render Attorney

Dr. Leonard Fromer
President of Healthcare Initiatives at Turner Impact Capital
Joel Swider: Hello and welcome to the Healthcare Real Estate Advisor podcast. I’m Joel Swider and I’m an attorney with Hall Render the nation’s largest healthcare focused law firm. I’m excited today to be speaking with Dr. Leonard Fromer, president of Healthcare Initiatives at Turner Impact Capital. Dr. Fromer is a nationally recognized expert in the areas of primary care, practice, redesign and transformation, quality improvement and outcomes measurement, vaccine compliance, quality improvement, and health system reform. He also served on the American Medical Association’s Commission on Healthcare Disparities and as the executive medical director of the Group Practice Forum, he’s been a practicing physician for over 28 years. Dr. F Fromer, thanks so much for joining me.
Dr. Fromer: Well, you are welcome. It’s great to be with you and I dunno if others say good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever people listening in this modern technological world, but happy to be here.
Swider: Well, thanks. Before we delve into Turner Impact Capital and its business model, I’d like to hear a little bit more about you and how you ended up in your current role. I know you went to both undergraduate and medical school at SUNY. Are you from New York originally?
Dr. Fromer: I am born in the Bronx, grew up in the city, long Island. Went upstate for undergraduate in Albany, SUNY Albany, and then down to New York City for medical school. And then, I don’t want to use the word escaped, but I would say migrated west to do my residency training program and 45 years later still here in the west coast.
Swider: Got it. Okay. What led you to become a doctor and how did you decide to specialize in family medicine?
Dr. Fromer: Great questions. In my case, it was pretty straightforward. I had a great role model. My family doctor when I was growing up, made house calls middle of the night in the winter many times from myself and my brothers when we needed him. He was a great role model. I don’t know how many people listening to this podcast remember or are of a vintage to remember. Marcus Wellbe, MD on television, the quintessential family doctor. The show ran on TV for about 10 years almost, I think, and he made an influence for sure on people of my generation. If you were thinking about going into medicine that the thing to do was family medicine, to take care of the whole person to address the social impact issues that people lived with and made a difference in their lives and their health. So when I went into medical school, there happened to be a kind of very experimental type program right off the bat, first year medical school, allowing those of us who were interested to do a primary care rotation that was unique.
Dr. Fromer: Most medical schools who didn’t do clinical rotations until your third year, and then it was really looking at every specialty in medicine. Trying to find the one that you thought would be a great fit as a student when you’re going through medical school to get your MD degree. Well, in our case, in my medical school, we had this elective that we could take and I was lucky enough to win the lottery. They only took a handful of people out of a big class, and that primary care experience really solidified my desire to be a family doctor.
Swider: Where was that? Dr. Fromer
Dr. Fromer: SUNY Downstate, now known as the health science Center at Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York.
Swider: Well, neat. Well, I know you’re currently the president of Healthcare Initiatives at Turner Impact Capital, and I wanted to give our listeners a sense of what Turner Impact Capital does. I think the business model is so compelling and cool. Could you give us a sense of that?
Dr. Fromer: Yeah, we are very unique, so it takes a little bit of explaining to look through the lens of how we approach healthcare and making things better and solving some of the big challenges our system, our healthcare system has in our country. First of all, we look at that through that lens and realize we don’t have a healthcare system in America. We have a sick care system and we need a great sick care system. We need to rescue people when they’re sick, no question about it. And we need to be the best in the world at that. And for most part, when people get access, we are great at that, but we’re not great at prevention. We’re not great at keeping people healthy and well. We’re not great at getting access to people, especially in communities that struggle to get healthcare access. Our system is very expensive.
Dr. Fromer: It’s the most expensive in the world by far. And when Turner was started, the founders, the principals who started Turner, particularly Bobby Turner, knew that the real critical legs of the stool that we build our lives on and our communities on really revolve around three things. They revolve around housing, affordable, high quality housing. They revolve around education, affordable, high quality education, and they revolve around healthcare. So those three points, education, housing, healthcare is what Turner is really all about. Within those three things, in order to be able to scale how we fix each of those and the challenges we face, it is our mission and theory that you can only scale and really address these gigantic issues in a model that uses market forces to be able to bring resources and capital to solving and particularly healthcare, I can speak about most widely, to solve the access issue.
So what we do in each of those three verticals in our company is we are the infrastructure component. We are the developer and builder of facilities and infrastructure to empower partners that we have in each of those three areas. In healthcare, we partner with healthcare organizations in education, we partner with charter public school operating companies. We own and operate the housing facilities that we have across the country, but we partner, for instance in healthcare with healthcare organizations who are driven by delivering quality. We build them, we develop and build for them a build to suit solution to empower them to deliver primary care in underserved communities. That’s our target and we can get into what that means, but in its core, at its core, that’s what we do.
Swider: That’s great, great background. I think one of the things that strikes me so much about that model is, and I’ve listened to interviews with Bobby Turner as well, and he talks about the importance of having a market-based really sustainable model and how that is different. Not necessarily that reliance on government grants or something is a bad thing, but in many of those areas that you described, education, housing, healthcare, many of the developers that are doing that are very reliant on incentives or grants or those types of things that could go away tomorrow if there’s a change in law. Of course in healthcare we’ve got the reimbursement structure, which is always going to be present, but I mean how does that model and sort of the market based approach differ from some of the others that maybe you’ve seen, and obviously your lens is on a healthcare side, but even more broadly.
Dr. Fromer: Yeah, great question. So I can kind of tell the story through healthcare and it’s really the story that you can spread to the other verticals. We have housing and education and it becomes obvious how we’ve designed the way we operate and how our model and business finance model flows to high quality clinical model. In healthcare, you can substitute in high quality housing, you can substitute in partnering with high quality education providers. What we do is as a partner with a clinical enterprise providing outpatient primary care, we seek to find communities that struggle to get good access to healthcare services and those communities tend to be urban dense, racially and ethnically diverse, low to median socioeconomic status and have been designated either a medically underserved area or a health provider shortage area by the government. And what that then filters out at the bottom, what comes out when we do all that, our clinical organizations that we do deep dives into diligence around looking for their quality and that they look at healthcare and say, the present and future way to do that is a value-based model of reimbursement, not a volume-based model.
Because when you align all those forces of rewarding high quality at reasonable cost, that’s exactly what value is in healthcare. It’s quality divided by cost, and you pay attention as a result. If you’re being rewarded for delivering high value, then as a provider of care that are seeing patients, the organizations that are seeing patients in the facilities that we develop and build for them, they’re paying attention to prevention, they’re paying attention to the importance of primary care. They’re paying attention to being driven by what we call the quadruple aim in healthcare in our country. One, how do the patients do with their health outcomes? We call it two, how satisfied are the patients and their families with the care they’re getting and the way they get it. Patient satisfaction, technically known as patient experience. Three, what’s the population dynamics around the people you’re responsible for seeing as a healthcare provider? So population health dynamics around metrics of key performance indicators. How are you doing with the population you take care of? Then drill down to each patient because of that. How are you doing with metrics around keeping people well, frail patients with chronic problems, keeping them stable, et cetera. Embedded in that obviously is access issues,
Getting to see your providers, how much time do you have with them when you see them, and then the fourth part of the quadruple is the experience of the care team from the doctors in the white coats, the PAs, the nurse practitioners, the staff that supports all of them, the team in the offices, how do they feel at the end of the day, if they’re not feeling great about what they’re doing, recruitment and retention is going to be really difficult. So putting all that together, you have a value-based reimbursement model. We can get into what that means, but that’s what we do. We designed our model to be able to let what I just described in the quadruple aim, thrive to motivate all of those four elements to be great.
Swider: Yeah. Let’s explore that a little bit. Dr. Fromer, what is the business model for the healthcare facilities fund at Turner?
Dr. Fromer: Yep. We start with the concept that we raise money from investors who of mind, whether it’s an individual high net worth individual or family. A bank could be an endowment pension fund, could be a university endowment, a foundation or whatever the shape and form of the investor looks like. What’s common to all our investors is they care about the same things we care about as a mission to serve the underserved, to pay attention to the outcomes that need to be improved, to give people great access to great healthcare. They want to return on their investment, but they also want to be shown, and we do have to do this with them and based on our operating documents, we show them the impact that their investment is making by pooling all the investments we get for the fund, for my healthcare fund for instance, and then being able to provide up to a hundred percent of the capital needed as a developer builder to create the infrastructure.
That is where the healthcare partners are going to be seeing the patients and taking care of them that that’s the basis of the model. We can provide up to a hundred percent of the capital in return for that. They become our tenant and the landlord tenant relationship where we buy the property that they’re going to see the patients in. We build the building, we hand over the keys and the day we hand over the keys, their rent starts in a long-term lease, usually 15 to 20 years, two five-year options kind of would be pretty average for how the timeline looks in terms of something you said a few minutes ago, making sure it’s sustainable and long-term in the community, the presence will be there, that it’s not a quick turnaround and then patients don’t have access. Again, it’s a long-term relationship for stability and success in the community for that healthcare provider, the basis for how the rent is calculated is very transparently looking at the total budget for the project.
So we would have a healthcare provider in a market. You’re in Indianapolis, so let’s say Indianapolis. We have a healthcare provider that says we want to do primary care. Here’s the general part of the metropolitan service area of Indianapolis that we want to do it in. We go out, our real estate division finds maybe five to 10 properties that look like they would be perfect for what size is needed, whether it’s a ground up or an adaptive reuse project. We do both, but we present those options to the healthcare provider and they pick the one they like the best. We negotiate with whoever owns the property and what’s on that property to buy it. Once we buy it, we then work with our healthcare partner. Either they provide the architecture and design people or we can provide it to them if they want us to, but essentially we design and build to suit the facility all in the cost of the property, the pre-construction cost, the hard and soft cost of construction, whatever that total is is the basis for the rent, and then we give them a purchase option if they want.
I’d say about 75% of the projects we do in healthcare, the entity that we partner with buys exercises, their purchase option. It’s a pre-agreed upon purchase price. It’s not fair market value, so it’s a great deal for them if they want to buy it and own the property and turn their rent receipts into debt payments, mortgage payments, a lot of the organizations, I’m sure we’ll talk about it in a few minutes, are not-for-profit enterprises and healthcare and they have access to low cost debt financing, bond issues and things. So they use that to finance the purchase generally, usually around four years, in three or four years into the operating project operating and they’re seeing patients and they’re at full flow of patients after a few years and that’s when they want to exercise that option. Again, that option is based on, and that prearranged price is based on the total project cost and that’s a transparent, they see every line of the budget to get to that total project cost.
Swider: That’s interesting. And so supposing that the tenant does not exercise the purchase option, I guess then Turner Impact Capital would remain the landlord or do you sell at some point or how does that work? And also well separately, I’m curious who manages the facilities as well.
Dr. Fromer: Yeah, so great question. So these are triple net leases. We remain the owner and landlord. We have a limit on that. We operate as a reit, like a reit, and it was our closed end fund. So nine or 10 years in, we’ve got to return the capital to the investors. So the life cycle of each fund is that if they don’t exercise their purchase option, then we go to the healthcare REIT market for instance, and make the property available and someone buys it and we step out of the transaction at that point. But critically important, as I’m sure you’re kind of thinking about it already, when that person or entity who buys the property from us does that, they inherit everything in that lease, nothing changes for the healthcare operator. All of the terms stay the same. The length of terms stays the same. The rent’s already been put on in writing in the lease document. This lease document, by the way that I’m talking about from the beginning, we’re talking about 75 to a hundred page document. It’s very, very comprehensive, but all of that stays the same. The purchaser inherits that. So their triple net, as I said, 15 to 20 years, two five-year options is kind of standard.
We’re flexible, somewhat interesting. Sometimes people ask, well, do you always own the property? The answer is almost always, we have to have control of the property long-term to guarantee sustainability and permanence in the community for the patients and the impact we want to make. So occasionally there will be a situation where because of who owns the land, a government entity might own the land. There might be things that happened in the past that make the land not for sale, but the owner of the property would be willing to do a long-term ground lease so we can do a long-term ground lease. I’m talking like 50 to a hundred years in lieu of buying it.
Swider: Okay, and who then manages it during that time that you’re the landlord?
Dr. Fromer: Yes, so we do and that management, again, it’s triple net. So for everyday functions, we have a division of property management that we have people here. I’m looking at them right outside office who are getting calls about what’s happening at the property and making sure everything that needs to be done is done from repairs to maintenance to we’re real hands-on with making sure that the systems in the building are up to snuff, kept high quality. When we buy a property, first and foremost, we look at the infrastructure systems in the building and make sure if it’s a building and often they are that are more than a decade old, for instance, what state is the roof in? We’ll frequently put on a new roof before it’s needed, but knowing that the one that’s on there is going to be needed in a few years, so we’ll replace it at the time we purchase the property. Air conditioning and heating, HVAC systems, things like that. But we have a group of folks who are our property people and they’re working every day fielding calls from our tenants and dealing with property specific issues.
Swider: Sure. So I saw on your website that since inception of this fund, which was in 2017, that Turner’s healthcare funds have developed or invested in 42 of the state-of-the-art community, healthcare facilities all around the country really. I know you mentioned that in some cases early on you will have a partner, a healthcare provider that might tell you, Hey, I want to be in this particular market. But then you said you had furnished them with maybe a few different options for site selection. How do you choose, I mean, I know that’s maybe part of the community impact of this investment in general, but how do you then narrow it?
Dr. Fromer: Do you mean the sites within a submarket or how do we pick the markets?
Swider: Well, maybe both, I guess maybe, yeah, if you don’t mind, talk about both.
Dr. Fromer: Sure. So starting with the markets, we look at every city, coast to coast. As I said, these generally tend to end up being urban projects just because of the characteristics that are needed to make it work in a market model, particularly population density.
So we would look at a market and think about what is healthcare like in that market? What is needed? Where are they with the movement from volume to value reimbursement in that market in general. There are characteristics around that that we can investigate and basically we try and match up the markets we want to be in with that set of characteristics of market, population, density, demographics, racial and ethnic diversity, socioeconomic conditions. We go where there’s need and we choose the submarkets within that based upon what the healthcare partner we work with, where they want to be in that market. We don’t speculate in the sense that we won’t go and find locations, markets, and locations and then go to the healthcare providers in that market and say, who’s interested? We respond to a provider organization in a market that says, we need you to build something for us.
Here’s where we want to be. Present us with opportunities, facility opportunities, and that’s pretty much how it unfolds When we kind of zoom in and narrow down to one or maybe two or three locations that a provider might say, those are the ones we want or that’s the one we want. We start to do a real deep dive into both financial and clinical diligence. So we have parallel teams doing diligence on the finances of the clinical provider organization, looking at really extensively at their balance sheets, assets, cash on hand. I mean, there’s just a lot of metrics that we go into On the clinical side, we look at their quality as reported in various local, state and federal reports that they have to file based on the kind of facility they are. We look at their quadruple aim performance essentially, and before we will go thumbs up on a particular project, our investment committee gets a very extensive report on the financial and clinical diligence outcomes, what we’ve learned, and then we have a process for that committee to vote on whether or not we’re going to do that project.
Swider: That makes sense. One thing I noticed was that most of the facilities that are featured on your website are either PACE program of all inclusive care for the elderly facilities, FQHCs, federally qualified health centers, or their Medicare Advantage facilities. Could you give us a sense of each of these programs and why you’re focused on these types of patients or these types of facilities?
Dr. Fromer: Yeah, outstanding question. I think when we started and we developed a thesis and mission for the fund, we didn’t know it was going to be those kind of facilities. What we did know was we wanted to build for organizations that wanted to take care of patients who were struggling to get access, who were frail, who had chronic problems, who were being rescued at very high costs, typically in the submarkets that we would look at and say, wow, there’s people. Everybody’s using the emergency room for their primary care needs and that’s not going to work. Right? And you end up kind of landing on where are the programs that we have in the country that we can solve the challenges of in terms of access, in terms of quality, in terms of cost and make a difference, really make an impact on key indicators of how people are doing in healthcare with their quadruple aim.
It turns out that, for instance, the PACE program, all inclusive care for the elderly, every project we do has to have a value-based reimbursement component to it by our need and definition. That’s our motivation, and we looked at the landscape and said, wow, one of the most prominent along the spectrum of moving from volume to value big time is pace, because anybody who knows PACE from the GetGo, it’s a combined federal and state program. I think 34 states have PACE now, but when you do a PACE center, the care that’s provided in the clinic part of the building and the services provided in the social impact adult daycare part of the building, that’s what PACE is for people who are not very familiar with it. Imagine a building with both a medical primary care clinic and an adult day health center and then physical therapy. Most of ’em have dental eye care, a lot of social services.
It is an alternative. The pay centers are alternatives to a nursing home for patients who would otherwise need a nursing home if they didn’t have the support of going to the pay center and getting those services. All of that is paid for in a capitated way, global capitation per member per month value-based payment, and that attracted us to that right off the bat. It was like, wow, that is exactly what we want to see. That within a budget, the provider has to get great quadruple aim results and show that they’re making an impact. Inherently in the program, they have to file reports with the government entities that they get licensed by and are regulated by on delivering great care, great outcomes, great access, paces of the manual of what you have to do for the patients is very thick and in essence, they have to provide transportation for the patients.
The PACE operator has to provide transportation from home to the center and back, has to provide a hundred percent of the global healthcare needs of the patient from primary care to specialty care. Everything is included in that monthly capitation they got to provide when they come to the pay center, two meals that day for them, nobody sleeps there. Patients go home every night. It’s a community-based program. So we were attracted because of the characteristics of that, particularly the value-based capitation component, very qualified community health centers. Again, it is an amazing program that America has to give access to all patients who walk through the door. That’s the basis of what they agree to do to become federally qualified and be a community health center. Any patient who walks through the door gets care regardless of their ability to pay. So we have the underserved getting access.
We have an organizational structure in the country that provides care in a setting where there is a prospective payment part of that system that came about when Obamacare was signed into law and a comprehensive nature of providing in these community clinics, primary care services, dental services, right, eyecare services, things that we look to that we think translate into a great value-based proposition for people to get care. And in this case, in many, I would say overwhelmingly in the FQHC world, it’s taxpayers dollars through one way or shape or another that are funding it and getting value for the money that the country puts into it. It’s a fantastic program. There is a big, big need for infrastructure because when you look at the program, a lot of those centers are cramped, they’re too small, they’re stuffed with patients, they’re over capacity and bricks and mortar that’s out there to make do for what patients need and communities need.
There’s a mismatch. So it turns out to be, again, what we want to do, the Medicare Advantage program, if people kind of know the term but maybe not very familiar with how it works, it’s again a value-based payment model part of Medicare. So for patients who choose to be in Medicare Advantage, we see communities that have the population density, that have over patients, over 65 dense population, and the ability of the program in those communities, not the ability, the need to have infrastructure to see those patients in. So the Medicare Advantage program is again, a per member per month fee that the government pays to private insurance plans who then have to build a network of providers for those patients who sign up for that and that payment, and we should talk about this with our remaining time, the level at which the value payment occurs is something that people don’t stop and think about all the time, and they should because you could have a value-based payment per member per month going from the government in Medicare Advantage, for instance, to the health plan. But then how is the health plan paying the providers who see the patients who sign up as members with that plan,
Are they paying them a fee for service for each thing, a volume-based payment, or are they turning that around and after the health plan gets its administrative cost and profit, are they turning it around and paying to the providers a per member per month value based payment or not?
Swider: Yeah, I never thought about that.
Dr. Fromer: Yeah.
Swider: What do you see? I mean, do you see both?
Dr. Fromer: It is definitely in the country. The footprint is both ways, but we seek to build Medicare Advantage centers for provider organizations to see patients when they get paid, the provider gets paid a capitation payment. That’s what we prefer because we think it really organizes all of the incentives in the right direction. As long as somebody’s paying attention to quality, quality within that per member per month budget, that’s when magic happens. Prevention happens. Efforts are made every day to have the care team create a care plan. Again, it’s frail. Elderly patients in Medicare Advantage, for instance, low income, frail, elderly is who’s the core kind of patient that are in the facilities that we build in these communities and that they track metrics that we ask them. It’s in the lease that they sign with us when we build the center that they have reporting requirements to show us key performance indicator metrics that they are delivering on that quadruple aim.
So we track things like FaceTime with providers, frequency of appointments, metrics around how easy it is to get access either live or on a screen or through other technology, but that they have great access, they get great outcomes, that the patient satisfaction and experience scoring is terrific and that the staff loves to work there. At the end of the day, they feel great about what they did. So you put all that together and it’s a set of metrics like things like how often do patients at a particular facility we’ve built that the patients cared for there, how often do they end up in the hospital and how many bed days per thousand per year, per thousand patients per year do they generate against a standard of excellence? And we looked at that very carefully and thoroughly. How many times as a patient who has to end up in the hospital for something that happened in that Medicare advantage population, how many times after they get discharged do they get readmitted?
So what’s the readmission rate? There’s a standard for that called 30 day all cause readmissions, and what is it for the entity that we built the site for against for that county, for instance, what’s the average, and I’m proud to say that are key performance indicator metrics are they knock the socks off of the competition, let’s put it that way. They all do. Great. So that’s kind of how we ended up in those types of facilities, and I’m really proud to say that when COD hit great example of a metric, the PACE providers that we built facilities for had an average of one third, the number of cases of Covid and one third, the number of deaths that the same population acuity level of patients had in nursing homes. We had one provider who won a national award. They had one 10th the number of cases and deaths. So making a difference, making an impact, changing the lives of people in the communities they live in.
That’s really neat. I’ve listened to some of your other interviews that you’ve given and read about you, and I know that you’ve been a champion and really kind of an early adopter for this value-based care, the model that you’re describing and your work at the A MA and A A FP and elsewhere, taking a little bit more of a real estate spin on that, and I know it’s sort of been a transition over the course of years and decades from volume to value, and I think we’re continue to move down that path, but can you think about how that might drive that value-based care model might drive healthcare facilities investment maybe in a new direction or in a particular way?
Oh, absolutely. So I can give you examples. We’re proud that we were chosen to present how we build to empower prevention in those facilities. We were chosen to provide a session at the national meeting of the Pace Association, national Pace Association a few months ago. Room was packed and it was a panel presentation that we did on how do you innovate in building these facilities that really does make a difference. So a few examples, the whole idea of patient-centered, team-based collaborative care versus the world of volume-based care where there tends to be this kind of jet pilot type model of the doctor zooming into an exam room, tell me what’s wrong. Within eight minutes, hearing an interrupting the patient and trying to get to the diagnosis and recommending something and zooming out to the next patient gives way in a value-based patient-centered team care collaboration process to needs that of how you literally build the bricks and mortar, right?
The spaces that you allot for team meetings to happen, the communication systems, that internal communication systems. Imagine a pace center where there’s a medical clinic and patients come to that center, they’re delivered to the center, they have the transportation and 10 people get off the van and they all have appointments in the clinic that day, but they’re also there and they’re going to be there for about maybe five hours and they’re going to have two meals and they’re going to be in the socialization side of the adult daycare side of the building. Plus they got to do physical therapy at some point. And oh, by the way, it’s the day the dentist comes in and they want to do a prevention cleaning and see the dentist for prophylaxis and oh, by the way, they busted their glasses and they have to go sit by the optometry optical side of what’s in the building.
So building all these components and then tying them all together with things like low voltage systems that pick up and know exactly where the patient is up to the second every second of the day when they’re in the building. So that staff is not walking around wasting time going, where is Mr. Smith? We got to find him. He’s got an appointment and now the team is waiting in the clinic. Putting all that together requires an infrastructure, keeping the visual and auditory parts of the technology. HIPAA compliant requires things to be built a certain way. Confidentiality, security, virtual visits. A lot of places in healthcare will just say, well, anybody with a computer screen can do a virtual visit with a patient or their family. Well, yes, that’s true, but if you really want to do a high quality version of that, it’s got to be done with sound isolation and it’s got to be done with visual isolation so other people can’t see and hear what’s going on, and you got to give the team the ability to do that virtual visit with the patient and or family that requires rooms to be a certain way, sound isolation to be a certain way.
You have flow, you have to design the way the clinic looks and where it is in the building relative to the kitchen and where people are going to eat. And then you start thinking about, well, what about the patients in pace who have a cognitive disorder, mild cognitive disorder or worse, and how do we take care of them so that there’s a therapeutic environment in the building actually starting in the vans that bring them to the building so that we help with addressing their dementia issues, their mild to moderate dementia issues. There’s perimeter control issues that we build into those systems, the technology systems so that wander management is optimized, keeping people safe, but also security of bad actors coming into the building. We keep people safe. So all of that goes into the design elements of the construction from the beginning of the design. I’m kind of really proud to say that of all the developers you’ll find doing healthcare facility development, there aren’t a lot. There are probably less than a few. We being one of them that has a healthcare experienced team in the design process, right,
Swider: Like a clinical,
Dr. Fromer: Yeah. I mean, me being a physician and my position in the development when I was speaking with the original principles of Turner and they said, we want you to be president of healthcare, and I literally said, are you guys crazy? I don’t know anything about real estate finances and that. They said, you’ll learn and we will surround you with people who know that, but we need the clinical value-based knowledge and excellence that you can bring to it. And we do that from the beginning of the design process. I sit in on those design meetings with the architects right at the get go and the client who’s going to be working in that facility, so form follows function.
Swider: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a huge value add.
Dr. Fromer: Yeah.
Swider: With the last couple of minutes we have left, I wanted to ask you, what do you view as some of your biggest challenges and opportunities right now?
Dr. Fromer: Well, anybody who’s involved in real estate, whether it’s healthcare or whatever it is, especially healthcare, there is drama every day, every day. Drama is a challenge, but also strategic drama is a challenge right now, the big challenge strategically is there’s a lot of turmoil happening with funding of programs that are a significant part of the patient population that we take care of in most of our facilities. I’m speaking of Medicare, Medicaid, I’m speaking about federal funding with the new administration, so much has been flying around and up in the air day by day, hour by hour. That turmoil translates to problematic decision making, let’s say in the industry that everybody is kind of stuck. It’s like, what’s going to happen? When’s the smoke going to clear? Well, there’s more smoke every day that’s happening. So that analogy is tragic here in Southern California from the fires that we’ve just had with clearing smoke.
Maybe it is something telling there in the analogy, but that’s a challenge on a day-to-day basis. The biggest challenge is we have, when you build a healthcare facility, for instance, pays an FQHC, a lot of jurisdictions in their zoning laws have nothing in them about things like pace. It’s silent. Is it a medical clinic? Is it an adult daycare center? That’s what their zoning address is. But then you walk in and say, well, we’re going to have both in the same building and they don’t know where to put us to get zoned properly and get permits, and that’s a challenge. I will tell you what is also a challenge on a day-to-day basis, things like parking requirements, big challenge in terms of having fitting jurisdiction requirements ratios for a number of parking spaces for the size of the building. Again, if you look at pace, nobody arrives by car except the staff, but then they ask you how many people are going to be in the building? Well, there’s probably upwards of a hundred or more in a typical pay center in a given day, but all of the patients are arriving, almost all are arriving by the vans
And not vehicles. So how do you approach a jurisdiction and say, because of that, therefore the parking ratio requirements for the medical clinic that’s in the building are very different than a typical doctor’s office, for instance, or a clinic. So we work through all of that every day. I think the biggest challenge strategically is which way the winds are blowing with value-based care. The movement to that and the federal funded and state funded programs of Medicare and Medicaid and how that’s going to change or not, what’s going to happen with regulations around that as well as statutory changes. Those are the things we really struggle with and deal with. Everybody’s got challenges with the cost of healthcare. We think the real strategic future in controlling costs and improving quality is primary care. Access to primary care in communities will make a world of difference for the better and value-based payment to the provider level, not just to the health plan covering the patient level, but value-based payment straight through to the provider level really is the best hope we have for aligning forces to move us towards a well care system and not a sick care system.
Swider: Yeah, I can only imagine that’s been rewarding for you to see as a physician, as a family physician and having really walked that walk over a number of years to see that continue. It’s really cool. Last question and I’ll let you go, but how do you measure success? And I mean that both professionally as well as personally,
Dr. Fromer: I’ll tell you my favorite anecdote, but it really can be expanded to how we should be measuring success. When I was in training in my family medicine residency, the man who started the program retired after I was in my second year. He was in his seventies. He was a family doc. He had spent his whole life taking care of people when he started the program and people said to him at his retirement dinner, what made you start a family medicine residency after a lifetime of taking care of patients and being well-known, and you could have sat back and gone fishing and blah, blah, blah. And he chuckled and he said, well, it took me 70 years to figure it out, but as a doctor with a white coat on in an exam room, I can help maybe 30 people a day, give or take. But if I can do something that will empower, enable hundreds of other people to become doctors and do a great job, thousands of other people, then I’m helping exponentially more patients, and that has stuck with me my whole life, and he’s right in his way.
It was training doctors to go out and be primary care excellence forces in the community to do that, to be doctors who do that. In my case, we have about 150,000 people in the facilities we’ve already built, and we’re still building more so by proxy, we’re making it possible for those people to get access to great care, and they’re people who are suffering from the disparities of our current system because of where they live, because of how much money is made by their family, because of the color of their skin, their ethnicity. These are disparities that should not exist, but we have them and addressing that. That’s really a driving force and measurement of success. If we can address those disparities and help people get a fair shake for what they’re entitled to, they’re guaranteed by no disparities rate, quality rate access, reasonable cost to whoever’s paying the bill. I mean, that’s what healthcare should be about.
Swider: Yeah. Well, Dr. Fromer, thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation and I wish you the best of success and thanks for joining me.
Dr. Fromer: Thank you for the opportunity. I appreciate it.