Cone Health System a Key to Economic Development

It’s the largest private employer in Guilford County, rich and well-run, a serious player in a recession-proof growth business. Yet somehow the Moses Cone Health System gets overlooked as a part of Greensboro’s economic development story.

As the Cone Health System celebrates the fiftieth birthday of its Moses Cone  Hospital, Greensboro should be figuring out ways to grow along with it. Healthcare jobs and healthcare businesses could do a lot to rebuild our economy, and to remake our image as a place to live and work.

Greensboro needs to leverage its success stories, and few enterprises have been as successful as the Health System. The community hospital endowed by Bertha Cone in memory of her husband, Moses, has evolved into a regional powerhouse with an annual operating budget of $575 million. Its five hospitals, along with doctors’ offices, outpatient facilities, and other ventures, employ almost 7,000 people; its chief executive, Dennis Barry, serves as board chairman of the American Hospital Association.

But Greensboro doesn’t much see itself or sell itself as a medical community, a place with a healthy healthcare economy. That may be because the consolidation that created the modern Cone system has been fairly recent, or because the nearby university medical centers at Wake Forest, UNC, and Duke command so much mindshare. In any case, it is past time to recognize what we’ve got, and to parlay it into something more.

If capitalism is a system of creative destruction, Greensboro has seen its share of the destruction part. It’s the creative aspect we need to emphasize if we’re going to replace traditional industries like textiles, tobacco, and furniture. With its intellectual capital and the nine-figure endowment of its Community Health Foundation, the Cone Health System could be plenty creative.

That means going beyond the ways in which it already brings well-paid people to this area, such as hiring doctors and nurses. It means more than spending tens of millions of dollars a year on construction, as Cone continues to do, or developing new practice areas like pediatric intensive care. The challenge is to exceed the organic growth of the local healthcare market by attracting and creating new jobs  and companies.

This role as economic engine goes well beyond the mission outlined by my grandfather’s aunt Bertha in 1911, and the Cone Health System (with which I have no formal relationship) can never forget its core business of providing healthcare to all who need it. But a strong local economy is important to the Health System’s health, too, and Cone is implicated in the welfare of its home town. “We do have a community obligation as an employer,” says chief operating officer Tim Rice. “I think there is an opportunity there in terms of broadening the economic base.”

One place to seize that opportunity might be the proposed Millennium Campus research initiative, a joint venture under discussion between North Carolina A&T and UNC-Greensboro. Modeled after N.C. State's Centennial Campus in Raleigh, which is home to about 100 companies, the Greensboro project is meant to encourage cooperation between the public universities and private businesses. (Now if only A&T chancellor James Renick could find just half the money he wanted to spend on Division One football for his engineering and computer science programs.)

The Health System, and the larger idea of a healthcare economy, could help define the mission of a research campus. One of its purposes would be to help Greensboro exploit niches unfilled by the university hospitals, and to work with economic development groups to turn ideas into jobs. There is already some movement in this direction, such as a genomics project Cone is working on with UNC-Greensboro and Duke, for which it is now seeking federal funds. “We are closer now to academic institutions than we’ve ever been,” says Rice.

Greensboro isn’t going to remake its economy overnight, and healthcare can’t power us back to prosperity on its own. But we should make the most of what we’ve got, and we’ve got a lot. Recognizing the value of a dynamic, locally-controlled healthcare system is one part of the prescription for economic recovery.

Edward Cone (efcone@mindspring.com or www.edcone.com) contributes a column to the News & Record on Sunday.

Last update: 5/14/2003; 8:09:33 AM.