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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Clinic Shopped Around for Home

Sandwiched between upscale art shops and fashion boutiques, UCLA Health will open the doors of an unusual clinic at Westfield Corp.’s Village at Topanga mall. While urgent care centers and doctors’ offices are typical in strip malls and industrial parks, the Topanga location represents a bit of an experiment for the university-affiliated nonprofit health group. The real estate is more expensive than a typical office location, and the surrounding tenant mix has no relation to medicine. “This facility is going to bring patients a lot of options,” said Maisa Rodriguez, practice manager at the Village branch. “We want to be a full-service clinic – that’s the goal.” Six UCLA doctors, specializing in practices from sports medicine to pediatric care, will begin working at the mall this month. For now, the location is a construction site on the mall’s second story, with the goal of opening in mid-October. UCLA Health has taken steps to adapt to the luxury retail setting. The clinic will be open weekends and extended hours to match the mall’s hours. Walk-ins will be always welcome, but because the facility’s waiting room will be small, UCLA Health will offer a shop-while-you-wait service. Patients with appointments can peruse the mall, then receive a phone call or text 15 minutes prior to when a doctor will be ready to see them. Also, the waiting room will come equipped with a U-bar, an area where patients can browse iPads featuring doctor-recommended health apps. Staff members will be able to help patients set up those apps on their personal devices. Medically, the approximately 1,350-square-foot clinic will offer primary care, internal medicine, pediatrics, sports medicine, women’s health, behavioral health and even acupuncture. It will have an X-ray machine and be able to triage trauma patients, an atypical feature for a primary-care office. “Our new office in Woodland Hills is really going to try to be patient friendly and patient focused,” said Dr. Lichuan Fang, lead physician at UCLA Health at the Village. “It’s really about access to care and trying to make it convenient for the patients.” Fang emphasized that UCLA Health doesn’t see this location as catering exclusively to a wealthy clientele. “I don’t think it’s upscale or luxury,” she said. “I think how we doctors are going to practice and what we do are going to be the same. Because of its location, because of the hours, we are able to offer more options.” Medical trends While this in-the-mall location office is a first for UCLA Health, it has been tried elsewhere with varying success. In 2007, Vanderbilt Health signed a 12-year lease for nearly half of the 850,000-square-foot One Hundred Oaks shopping mall in Nashville, Tenn. It still occupies the space, while retail stores fill in the rest of the property. In 2011, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., made the retail switch when it opened its Healthy Living store and health clinic at the Mall of America, but its doors closed in early 2013. According to the most recent Urgent Care Association of America Benchmarking Survey, 38 percent of urgent care centers are located in shopping centers or strip malls. These types of facilities meet a new demand for on-the-go health care. “The surge in walk-in clinics really speaks to the age we are currently in,” said UCLA Health’s Fang. “With our iPhones and iPads, people want instantaneous access, and this has spread to medicine.” Todd Nathanson, president of illi Commercial Real Estate, an Encino-based brokerage and property management firm, said he has noticed a rise in the number of clinics and urgent care centers in retail spaces across Southern California. He attributes this increase to the need for care compatible with people’s schedules. Many patients lack the time to get treatment and they tend to use emergency rooms for issues that aren’t necessarily emergencies. “There’s a definitive need in health care,” Nathanson said. “There’s clearly a gap.” The main challenge to mall-based medicine is the high cost of space, he said. Based on a typical triple-net lease – the standard retail rental agreement, in which the tenant pays a share of taxes, insurance and maintenance plus utilities – he estimates that UCLA Health could be paying $6 or more a square foot a month at the Village at Topanga. UCLA Health did not disclose its rent. By comparison, Nathanson said a typical Class A office full-service gross lease, in which the tenant doesn’t cover the triple-net costs, runs about $3 to $3.50 a square foot throughout L.A. County. However, even with real estate costs nearly double that of a typical doctor’s office, the benefits of a mall location seem to outweigh the extra overhead. “The higher rent is balanced by the fact that these locations are highly visible and generally have high traffic,” Dr. Robert Kimball, president of the board at the Urgent Care Association of America in Naperville, Ill., said in a statement. “Retail areas also are convenient options for patients who frequent these areas.” Mixing tenants UCLA Health’s move to the mall is part of a larger strategy to expand its presence beyond the university campus in Westwood. In 2012, it opened a clinic in Westlake Village, followed by one in Thousand Oaks in 2013. Last year, it opened offices in Porter Ranch and Simi Valley. It also acquired the Motion Picture and Television Fund health care centers in Santa Clarita, and it plans to build a cancer center there with a tentative opening in 2016. Most of these locations involve leases in established medical office buildings. What makes the mall clinic different is its presence among nonhealth tenants, such as fashion apparel shops, spas and restaurants. But clinics in these retail spaces have proved beneficial to the tenant mix, said broker Nathanson. Mall landlords select and place stores at properties to stimulate traffic and maximize revenue. “The main purpose of a lot of these retail properties is to create a synergy,” he said. “If doctor visits are running higher, than conceivably the retailers are doing more volume saleswise.” Larry Green, senior vice president of development at Westfield, said the Village at Topanga tries to serve the 1.8 million people in its trade area, and health is a part of that. “People understand the power of the UCLA brand,” he said in an email. “We all have to take care of our bodies and our health. If you can do that in an environment that is convenient, where you can go grab a bite before or after, do some shopping or take care of some other things on your to-do list, that is a big win.” Nathanson sees the trend of medical clinics moving to retail locations continuing in the future, but not so much at the high-end mall settings. “The model is more likely to gravitate toward community centers with drugstore and supermarket fronts,” he explained. “This mall is a unique case.” Yet UCLA Health is already looking toward the future and sees offices like the one at the Village as a viable option for expansion. “We’ll have to see what happens with this clinic first,” said branch manager Rodriguez. “I’m sure they will definitely consider having additional practices.”

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