Company news

Mainstreet Property Group LLC is trying to bring crowdfunding to nursing homes. The Carmel-based firm launched a new round of private placement fundraising Monday using a website run by Oregon-based CrowdStreet Inc. and a mix of traditional advertising in central Indiana. The goal is to raise $500,000 to $2.5 million to help Mainstreet construct a $13.3 million nursing care and rehabilitation facility in Bloomington. Mainstreet CEO Zeke Turner said if the Bloomington “test case” is successful, Mainstreet can use crowdfunding to boost its annual construction of health care campuses from $350 million currently to $500 million. Mainstreet is offering to pay “accredited investors” annual dividends of 10 percent while paying itself a $635,000 development fee. Mainstreet hopes to sell the Bloomington facility by mid-2015, which could boost investor returns to 14 percent. Mainstreet’s crowdfunding experiment comes as the company is under scrutiny over allegations that Turner’s father, state Rep. Eric Turner, helped defeat a nursing home construction moratorium that most of Mainstreet’s competitors supported.

Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield has signed contracts with 1,400 physicians under its Enhanced Personal Health Care initiative, which pays doctors extra to help keep patients healthier and out of the hospital. The initiative, coupled with accountable care organizations Anthem is working to form with hospitals, is part of a broader push in health care called value-based purchasing. “The biggest challenge in health care today is finding a way to improve quality while reducing costs,” said Dr. David Lee, Anthem’s vice president of provider engagement and contracting. As part of the initiative, Anthem shares with doctors claims information Anthem gathers on its patients so doctors can target their efforts on the patients most in need. Anthem also pays doctors an extra $3.50 per month for each Anthem patient they manage. If overall spending on Anthem patients goes down and doctors document they provided high-quality care, Anthem shares some of the savings with doctors at the end of the year. The enrollment of doctors so far is a bit of a step back from the Quality Health First program Anthem previously operated to encourage physician management of patients’ overall health. That program had 2,200 physcians participating when Anthem pulled out of it in early 2013.

St. Vincent Health and the Cleveland Clinic have partnered in the opening of a new 8,000-square-foot kidney transplant center in Portage, Ind., to see patients before and after their transplant surgeries in Indianapolis. In a press release, St. Vincent noted that the average wait time for a kidney transplant in the Chicago area is six years, compared with 14 months at St. Vincent Indianapolis Hospital. Patients waiting for a transplant via another hospital system can transfer their wait times to St. Vincent. St. Vincent and Cleveland Clinic established their transplant partnership five years ago, focusing on kidney and pancreas procedures. Transplant surgeons working at St. Vincent’s 11-bed renal transplant unit in Indianapolis are employed by Cleveland Clinic.

Community Health Network opened a 65,000-square-foot, free-standing cancer center on the campus of Community Hospital South. The facility centralizes all the cancer care providers patients see—including physicians, radiologists, social workers, dieticians and financial counselors—so patients can make fewer visits to the center. Community hopes the center, which includes 16 infusion rooms, serves patients from as far away as Columbus, Seymour, Shelbyville and Greensburg.