New Facilities, Partnerships Help Healthcare Systems Grow

As more people move into metro Denver's northwest corridor, Boulder Community Health will form partnerships and expand its services in areas where the community is growing.

Boulder Community Health, a not-for-profit healthcare organization established in 1922, has two hospitals and about 20 primary care practices in Boulder County, said Chief Strategy Officer and Vice President of Business Development Dr. Paul Hinchey, a panelist for Bisnow’s State of Denver Healthcare event Oct. 4. BCH is also invested in urgent- and specialty-care facilities and has one free-standing emergency department.

“We’re a big, little community hospital,” Hinchey said. “We’re a fixture in the community.”

And BCH, which is supported by the Boulder Community Health Foundation, continues to add services to its network, whether through partnerships or building new facilities.

“No one shrinks to greatness,” Hinchey said. “Growth has to be part of the strategy ... Everyone is focused on cost savings, but the other piece is that you have to grow strategically if you’re going to stay alive.”

In 2015, BCH sold an older hospital on 9 acres along Broadway at Alpine and Balsam avenues to the city of Boulder for $40M. The sale enabled it to build the new 180-bed Foothills Hospital at 4747 Arapahoe Ave., and the city allowed BCH to continue to lease back its existing facilities  on the site until its new ones were completed. BCH will be off the old campus by March.

Much of BCH’s expansion has been to the east of Boulder because that is where the population is shifting, Hinchey said. It is building new facilities in Erie and Superior.

“None of the young folks can afford to live in Boulder so they’re living out east,” Hinchey said. “We’re expanding typically more to the east. It’s a strategic capture of market share. If they don’t need to come into the hospital, it’s nice to be able to access their care closer to home.”

BCH is continuously evaluating its service lines to ensure it maintains a strong relationship with the community. If it can’t be the No. 1 or No. 2 provider of a particular service, it will try to partner with the organization that can, Hinchey said. For example, it is working with the University of Colorado-Boulder to establish an inpatient rehabilitation program.

“They have one on their main campus, but they’re saturated in terms of volume and were looking to expand,” Hinchey said. “We were looking for a partner. Everyone is getting a little more cautious right now about getting overextended. The big players are starting to think it is better to find a partner to work with on something than to jump in and take it on all by yourself.”

When it comes to building new facilities, Children’s Hospital Colorado takes a similar approach to BCH by clustering additional services around its hospitals. Children’s, which has about 16 locations throughout the region, is building a free-standing hospital at C-470 and Lucent Boulevard in Littleton. The site wasn’t able to accommodate all of its outpatient clinics, so it is looking at another location about a mile away, said Children’s Hospital Colorado Director of Facilities Operations Network of Care Henry Biela, another panelist for the Bisnow healthcare event.

Children’s also is looking at expanding its dental and outpatient clinics in a building near the Anschutz Medical Campus, where its main hospital is.

“We look for locations that are in proximity to another major hub of ours that are still close enough to those individuals who were going to our original location,” Biela said.

Hear from Hinchey, Biela and others about how healthcare is growing in Denver at Bisnow's The State of Denver Healthcare on Oct. 4 at the Hyatt Regency Aurora-Denver Conference Center.