Jackson Memorial Hospital is one of the largest hospitals in the country with more than 1,500 beds. Its trauma program is world-renowned, as is its transplant center — one of the busiest in the U.S.
Its incoming CEO wants to expand Jackson into new areas of Miami-Dade County and new areas of healthcare services.
“Our patients and their families are telling us that they want locations closer to where they live and work,” he told WLRN last week during an interview at the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce Economic Summit.
Jackson will open a new adult emergency department in April. The $300 million facility is only half of its emergency care expansion plans. A pediatric emergency room is due to open next year. It expects to see about 12,000 more emergency patients a year when both are up and running, representing a 10% increase of annual ER visits.
As Zambrana takes over the CEO role, he is looking to outpatient services delivered in what he called “outposts” for growth.
“You'll begin to see an expansion in ambulatory sites across and near our current facilities — south, west and north,” he said.
Jackson West Medical Center is the system’s most recent hospital. The $332 million facility opened in Doral in 2021. Money came from a 2013 voter-approved borrowing program.
Zambrana’s vision to expand Jackson’s outpatient business will require expanding the system’s brand. As the hospital-of-last-resort, most of Jackson’s care is paid through Medicare and Medicaid.
“We were thought often as the place of tertiary and quaternary care,” Zambrana said, “high acuity (care), where all other strategies clinically have failed. We want to really extend that and be a place where we can provide any type of healthcare services across the lifespan.”
Zambrana started as a nurse at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami 35 years ago. On June first, he will become the CEO of the public safety net hospital with about $3 billion dollars in revenue and one of the largest employers in Miami-Dade County.
The health system was down to five days of cash in 2011 when Carlos Migoya took over as CEO. The organization had lost $419 million over the previous three years. Migoya reversed the losses by reducing payment gaps, addressing billing issues and cutting jobs.
Payer mix — the proportion of patients utilizing government-funded health coverage such as Medicare and Medicaid, and privately insured patients — is a key influence on a health system’s finances. About 42% of Jackson patients pay for their health services with something other than Medicare and Medicaid.
Health care demand has been growing along with costs. The medical care inflation rate in South Florida was 4.7% for the year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That was almost twice the overall inflation rate of 2.6% for the region.
" All of our payers are pushing the entire industry for lower acuity and a lower price point," he said. "We're really expanding our portfolio and it is now time to round out our goal of being a fully integrated healthcare delivery network."
