IN the rooms at Thousand Oaks Surgical Hospital, wood-crafted cabinetry hides ugly wires and oxygen lines. Wall-to-wall windows offer a serene panorama of the Santa Monica Mountains.
There is a couch that pulls out into a bed for family members, a carpeted floor, a flat-screen television set and a roomy bathroom stocked with plenty of plush towels and a cozy waffle-quilt bathrobe. "The rooms are bigger, the food is like eating in a fancy restaurant....There's no comparison," says Jack Light, 70, of Westlake Village, who had a partial knee replacement there in late 2005.
"The service at the hotel ... "
Whoops. He meant to say hospital.
His verbal slip could have come straight out of the hospital's marketing plan. Thousand Oaks Surgical Hospital, one of a new breed of doctor-owned, for-profit specialty hospitals, was designed to look and feel like a vacation resort. "They're like four-star hotels," says Gerald Kominski, associate director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. "They're offering a luxury experience."
Hospitals like this might be the wave of the future, providing patients with care that is highly specialized, excellent, comfortable, efficient, courteous and largely infection-free. They might also be part of an economic tsunami that flattens the revenue general hospitals need to keep their emergency rooms, trauma centers, intensive care units and medical wards open -- services that no one covets, but anyone could need, at any unexpected, vulnerable moment.
Such a threat prompted Congress, in 2003, to impose an 18-month moratorium on building more for-profit specialty hospitals. (Right now there are about 100 nationwide, including at least eight in California and one -- Thousand Oaks -- in Southern California.) Congress also worried that physicians referring patients to hospitals they owned could represent a conflict of interest that might affect medical care.
The moratorium was lifted in June 2005, but it could be an additional six to eight months before the next crop of medical entrepreneurs might start breaking ground and pouring concrete. That's because the government is reexamining payment formulas for medical procedures before it gives the go-ahead for Medicare patients to be treated at any new specialty hospitals.
