The Florida Legislature passed a new law that came into effect this month that allows hospitals to accelerate construction projects in Central Florida by deregulating state-level controls.
HB 21: Hospital Licensure essentially cuts through long-standing government red tape that restricted general acute care or long-term acute care hospitals from adding services or buildings without approval; officially referred to as applying for a Certificate of Need (CON). Last-minute changes to the bill also saw requirements on hospitals to provide minimum bed requirements and to provide charity care were stripped from the final approved document.
Healthcare is a lucrative industry that grows with a city’s population and local heavyweights like Advent Health and Orlando Health are expanding throughout the region as well as their downtown campuses and the removal of these restrictions will result in more and faster hospital projects.
Advent Health, in particular, is looking to build a more dense, skyward-reaching campus which is easy to ignore if you’re simply driving through it day-to-day but when you see it laid out in front of you (like in the map below) it’s fairly clear that the future of Ivanhoe Village is in the clouds.
