Education and entrepreneurship have turned out to be a good mix for Cornell University Veterinary Specialists, which seven months after opened its hospital in Stamford, has attracted clients from a wide swath of the tristate region.
Cornell University signed a 10-year lease with the Harbor Point project developer Building and Land Technology to establish the 24-hour specialty and emergency-care animal hospital.
“What we”™re doing here is a very new model,” said Dan Gurvich, chief financial officer and hospital administrator with Cornell University Veterinary Specialists. “Essentially it”™s a hybrid between academia and private practice. We are a private for-profit subsidiary of Cornell University with the goal of maintaining the best practices in a private sector with an education and outreach mission.”
The young hospital, which focuses on dogs and cats, is the brainchild of Michael Kotlikoff, dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University, and acting chairman and CEO of the hospital.
“The for-profit model was not the original plan, but one which was influenced by our desire to be responsive to concerns about unfair competition,” Kotlikoff said. “The ambition of CUVS is to create a new model for clinical veterinary care that combines the excitement and cutting edge elements of academic veterinary medicine with the efficiency and patient care of a small private hospital. The hospital also helps to financially support the country”™s top ranked veterinary training center and at the same time contributes to animal health discovery and student teaching.”
The facility is in a 20,000-square-foot, two-story adaptive reuse at 880 Canal St., which was formerly the administrative building for the old Yale Lock factory.
Gurvich said that since the hospital”™s inception, Cornell University leadership has been vocal about wanting to repeat its unique entrepreneurial model.
“What we”™re here to show is that a sustainable model, that combines the best level of care and knowledge that you find in an academic center can be done in the real world in a financially sustainable way,” Gurvich said.
The building is divided into four areas: outpatient exam rooms and treatment areas; an intensive care unit and emergency rooms; surgery; advanced imaging; and administrative and academic, which includes a lecture room.
The hospital does not provide general practice services like those offered by a primary care vet, but instead is a specialty and emergency hospital.
“You end up at our hospital in one of two ways ”“ you are either referred to us by your primary care veterinarian or you come in through emergency,” Gurvich said.
Though the facility is not a teaching hospital, it does have medical residents coming to intern and observe.
“Those offer some very rich observational experience to students, something very different from what they see at the teaching hospital in Ithaca,” Gurvich said.
The hospital also offers weekly continuing education workshops for veterinarians and pet owners, as well as a summer program for high school students interested in pursuing veterinary careers.
“There”™s a lot of educational activity around here,” Gurvich said. “We really have a bit of an incubator environment, but like any startup our primary goal for that last six months has been getting the wheels moving.”
Originally planned as a Westchester County project, the realization of an underserved pet owner community in Fairfield County brought the project across the border.
After treating patients for half a year, Gurvich said the clientele base has proved itself to be far reaching.
“Some of the critical needs of animals and their owners were not being attended to,” Gurvich said. “We have clients who come from across Fairfield County, Westchester County, the five boroughs, Long Island, northern New Jersey and the Hudson Valley, as well as northern and central Connecticut.”
The hospital has also enabled the school to hatch veterinary proposals conceived by veterinary academics in Ithaca. Cornell is currently creating an inclusive canine DNA bank, which began as a study on canine hip dysplasia on its Ithaca campus.
“Colleges and universities are inherently complicated places,” Kotlikoff said. “By creating smaller, entrepreneurial programs we can respond nimbly and have a bigger impact on the profession and the public.”
Just as human medical centers have markedly expanded their clinical programs, combining patient care with clinical trials and discovery, Cornell felt it needed to create similar programs to extend its veterinary school”™s impact, he said.
“We can layer in academic collaborations and allow small projects to become large comprehensive realities.”
The hospital has six board accredited veterinary specialists, three overnight emergency doctors and an attending critical care specialist present seven days a week in addition to a full support staff.
“We”™re trying to make the ideal veterinary experience as compassionate and within reach as possible,” he said. “Although we are a for-profit, we are a mission driven for-profit. We are not all about the bottom-line, we have to be sustainable, but we don”™t necessarily have to make a ton of money, and can rather focus on really great patient-centered medicine in a sustainable way without having to compromise.”
