White Plains Hospital President and CEO Jon B. Schandler still remembers well his first visit to the changing community whose hospital”™s growth he has shepherded for 35 years.
It was September 1976. Schandler, a 26-year-old certified public accountant at Price Waterhouse, took the commuter train from New York City for his interview.
The C.P.A. knew nothing about health care and wondered why hospital officials had called him to interview for the comptroller”™s job. Schandler, the acknowledged dean of hospital administrators in Westchester County and the region, recalled with a smile his self-doubt and inexperience at the time.
White Plains in the ”™70s was embarked on urban renewal projects. Walking from the downtown train station to the hospital on East Post Road, Schandler crossed a gritty landscape of leveled buildings and blocks of properties cleared for new development.
“It really was one big vast lot,” he remembered.
What does White Plains look like? His wife asked him later about their prospective home.
There”™s nothing, he replied.
The young accountant was hired. The hospital had found the “financial guy” it needed. Five years later, he was appointed hospital CEO. It is the office from which Schandler this month is calling on donors at the start of a new capital campaign, the largest in the community hospital”™s 118-year history.
Starting privately among major donors ahead of a more public campaign launch, the CEO already had tallied $13 million in donations to the hospital”™s $100-million The Time Is Now campaign. “We picked up $3 million in the last four or five days,” he said recently.
Despite the good start to the campaign, “It”™s a tough time to fund-raise,” he said.
“It seemed like a challenging time then,” Schandler said of his early years at the hospital. “As we look back, it now looks like a much easier time.”
In Westchester and throughout the nation, hospital administrators now must delicately navigate the foggy, still largely unregulated regions of health care reform in the wake of last year”™s narrow passage by a bitterly divided Congress of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. With several court challenges to the massive legislation pending and with Republicans who voted against the Democrat-sponsored reform bill having regained control of the House of Representatives, confusion and uncertainty over implementing the multitude of mandated measures are not likely to clear soon.
“In the end, health care has to be dealt with effectively,” said Schandler. “Right now, what is law probably won”™t work. It”™s not funded adequately. I believe probably five, six, seven years out, you”™ll find there”™s a funding shortfall. ”¦ I think that”™s the concern that people have today.
“What”™s important is that the health care system needs to be reformed and there needs to be a system to allow that. At the end of the day, I don”™t have the confidence that government is capable of fixing it.”
Saddled with staggering deficits, both state and federal governments cannot be counted on to continue funding health care costs, which account for 25 percent of their budgets, said Schandler. Deeper cuts to Medicare and other public health programs will put greater financial pressure on already squeezed hospitals, as demand for hospital care is expected to rise about 20 percent over the next two decades, he said.
The CEO today leads a much larger and more costly nonprofit health care enterprise than the one he found in White Plains 35 years ago. With slightly more than 2,000 employees and an annual payroll of more than $155 million, White Plains Hospital is one of the top three or four employers in the city, said Schandler, and among the top 12 employers in Westchester. Its current annual budget is more than $300 million, compared to $16.5 million when Schandler started as comptroller in 1976.
“One of our strategies is to use philanthropy” as a source of capital for improvement and expansion projects and so avoid debt, said Schandler. “Our goal is to use philanthropy for non-operating purposes. We try very hard to have the discipline not to use it to fund operations.”
Donations allowed the hospital in 2010 to renovate and expand its emergency department and add elective and emergency angioplasty procedures at its cardiac catheterization lab without debt financing. Both departments are among the “revenue-raisers” that Schandler said the 292-bed hospital needs to survive and grow in the new era of health care.
The hospital”™s most recent capital campaign in 2006 raised $43 million, well above its $35-million goal. The new campaign aims to raise $75 million for renovations to hospital facilities and an additional $25 million as a reserve fund, said Schandler, “so it”™s a little different than what we”™ve done in the past.”
Hospitals officials plan to break ground this fall on a four-year to five-year construction project. Perkins Eastman, the project architect, has added a six-story patient wing to the main hospital building, which also will be enhanced by a new covered entrance and a more visitor-friendly lobby with an atrium café. Depending on costs, the project could include a glass-enclosed pedestrian bridge over Davis Avenue that connects the hospital with a municipal parking garage used by hospital staff and visitors.
Schandler said the capital project also will add 12 large private rooms for patients and expand and renovate the hospital”™s 45-year-old surgical facility, adding two operating rooms. A new radiology facility also will be added near the main entrance.
When preparing the hospital”™s master facilities plan, said Schandler, “One of the questions we asked ourselves was, do we stay here?” The community hospital could instead build a new facility in a campus setting outside of downtown White Plains.
“Our feeling was, this was the right location.”
The central location especially well serves emergency patients. Hospital officials project 55,000 emergency-room visits this year, roughly double the number of emergency visits at Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, said Schandler. Emergency-room visits are up 9 percent from 2010, when the department handled a 20 percent jump in patient numbers from 2009.
In the uncertainty that envelops health care in the U.S., “The hardest part is that you”™re flying blind a lot,” said Schandler. “You try to do what”™s right.
“Our conclusion is that we”™re running well today. That will position us well for whatever happens.
“With all of the craziness, I think if anyone”™s going to be successful, we”™re going to be successful” in the new era for health care, Schandler said.
