Ms. Marisol Fitch

Certificate of Need

Agency for Healthcare Administration

2727 Mahan Drive

Building 3, Mail Stop 28

Tallahassee, Florida 32399

Subject: Support of Central Florida Health Services’ CON Application

Ms. Fitch,

We are the Integrated Independent Physicians Network, LLC, a network of over 1,100 independent multi-specialty physicians and other healthcare providers in Central Florida. We are honored to support Central Florida Health Services’ Certificate of Need application for a new hospital in the Lake Nona area.

We believe such a hospital will serve a rapidly growing community located just minutes from Orlando International Airport that is becoming a location of choice for residents and businesses that all need healthcare.

As providers, we believe the partnership academic teaching hospital will promote the health of the Lake Nona/southeast Orange County community and offer the area a new option in medical care delivery, research and education. We will absolutely admit our patients to the hospital because we believe it will offer enhanced access to state-of-the-art inpatient care and give our community the latest and most innovative treatments of illness, injuries and diseases.

We also believe the hospital will help in our organization’s commitment to the Triple Aim of healthcare delivery. We are dedicated to high-quality, cost-conscious, physician-driven, outcome-oriented, patient-friendly care. Our goal is to develop a complete healthcare delivery system, integrating patient records and clinical coordination for those who seek our care. Because these goals align so well with the UCF College of Medicine’s, we recently signed a letter of intent to form a partnership with the medical school to work together to improve patient care by sharing resources such as Health IT, clinical best practices and collaborative research efforts.

Our partnership with UCF is intended to facilitate collaboration in areas such as more seamless communication between doctors, shared telemedicine services, population health studies, group contracting with payers, and medical staff training and credentialing. As part of that effort, we hope to form joint centers of excellence in treatment areas of high need in our community. Our goal is to develop innovative, collaborative, high-quality, patient-centered care that is cost conscious and incorporates medical education and research. And in the process, we believe we can be a model for care across the community, state and nation.

We strongly believe the Central Florida Health Services hospital will be an ideal location in this effort. It will allow us to develop innovative treatment options for both in-patient and out-patient care and the transitions in between. It will allow us to study and disseminate best healthcare practices throughout the community. Our location in Lake Nona, a digitally connected, health-focused community, provides a living lab to develop and test these efforts and myriad others. As such, the Central Florida Health Services hospital will give us a unique opportunity to find answers to today’s unanswered health problems by offering a new facility dedicated to research-intensive care.

The proposed Central Florida Health Services hospital will also provide physicians and patients with another option in care. That not only helps our healthcare providers, it diversifies healthcare choices for our community.

For these reasons, we strongly support the CON application of Central Florida Health Services. We believe its application best serves our community’s needs.