UVA Health, a roughly $4 billion health system with four acute care hospitals, looks set to expand its network across Virginia as it diversify its revenue.
The academic health system, anchored by flagship hospital UVA Medical Center in Charlottesville, in 2021 acquired Novant Health’s ownership stake in a three-hospital joint venture. Craig Kent, CEO of UVA Health and executive vice president of health affairs at the University of Virginia said in January that UVA Health established a $300 million biotech institute to advance gene and cell therapy research and expand the reach of clinical trials. .
Kent, who joined UVA Health in February 2020, spoke with Modern Healthcare about system expansion strategy, biotech investments and other priorities. Interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What drives UVA Health’s statewide expansion?
UVA Health has focused heavily on central Virginia. It bills itself as a nationally recognized academic medical system with its kind of ivory tower in its 700-bed hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia. That is not a recipe for success. In the first year, we purchased three hospitals in northern Virginia, two of them in the Manassas area and one in Culpeper. In the last two and a half years, we have significantly developed those hospitals. They are mostly [at] full [capacity]and we’re bringing more complex care to those communities.
We have some pretty important joint ventures in different disease areas like cardiovascular, oncology etc. We have developed links with several other health systems like Centra [Health] and Carilion [Clinic]. Centra and Carilion are really strong health systems, but they don’t have a lot of complex care. These links allow us to send our doctors to those institutions and patients to come to us for pre- and post-operative care. One of our goals is to expand statewide. We really want to be Virginia’s healthcare organization.
UVA recently established a biotechnology institute with the help of a private donation, state funding and internal investment. What is strategy?
The goal here is to have a half-billion dollar biotech institute. The focus will be on gene therapy, cell therapy, phase 1 clinical trials, which we will eventually need FDA approval for. The goal is to bring biotechnology to Virginia: more businesses, more jobs. We’re going to build a research building, which will feature biomanufacturing as its main feature, where you can create human-grade materials that can be used for phase 1 trials. Then , in addition, we will be recruiting 100 new researchers. Our appeal as an academic health system is the complex patients we care for. Then you add in the possibility of cutting-edge or groundbreaking therapies, for things like sickle cell anemia, which gives us traction not just regionally but nationally and international.
Is the academic health system the best place to provide primary care?
We must learn to do double duty. The task of caring for these truly complex patients is a very different one than running a low-level, high-performance, high-volume, primary care program. To be competitive, we will have to be able to run two different types of care, more than this community plus model. One of our missions is to take care of the most complex patients on one side and the most difficult on the other. And we take care of many people in between, but many of them can find other places to get care.
What role should the academic health system play in health care? How do they need to develop?
I think you will see continued and increasing pressure on academic health systems to behave as if they were non-academic health systems. Words that academic health systems don’t really understand—diabetes care, digital front doors—we’ll increasingly have to get used to to stay competitive and attract patients to us . I talk a lot about these impoverished and complex coronary patients, but most of the patients we care for are in between. If we don’t have [the in-between] take care of the patient, we will not be successful in the end.
