FL-Less babies in intensive care
Miami HeraLD
Posted on Wed, Aug. 06, 2008
Pediatrix wonders where the babies are
BY JOHN DORSCHNER
Pediatrix Medical Group, South Florida's largest publicly traded healthcare company, reported solid results for the second quarter, with net patient revenue up 15 percent, but executives and analysts spent considerable time Tuesday on a conference call asking where the babies were.
After a long-term upward trend of admissions to its neonatal intensive care units across the country, the Sunrise-based company reported it has seen five consecutive months in which the number of newborns was lower than the same month during the prior year.
''A volume decline like that just hasn't happened in our history,'' said Chief Executive Roger Medel, who founded the company in 1979.
For the second quarter, the decline in the neonatal intensive care units was down 1.4 percent.
Medel said the admissions to intensive care were remaining stable at 11 or 12 percent of all births at the hospitals where Pediatrix has units, and those hospitals weren't losing market share to other facilities. There have simply been fewer births.
Medel said there was some anecdotal evidence that births in 2008 were down in several large states where Pediatrix does business, but the company had no solid data to explain the trend.
Rick Wade of the American Hospital Association said the latest numbers compiled by his group showed that births in 2006 were up slightly from 2005.
Ira Sheskin, a demographer at the University of Miami, said the latest major national data comes from 2006. He noted a study from the National Vital Statistics System that showed a huge drop of birth rates for teenage mothers from 61.8 per thousand in 1991 to 40.5 in 2005.
Rates for white teenage mothers dropped from 43.4 to 25.9, blacks from 118.2 to 60.9 and Hispanics from 104.6 to 81.7.
Pediatrix spokesman Bob Kneeley it was true that births to teenage mothers are more likely to result in babies going to intensive care to the extent that the mothers didn't have proper pre-birth care, but he said the downward slide in teenage mothers appeared to have reversed itself slightly in 2006. What's happened since then is uncertain, Kneeley said.
Chief Financial Officer Karl Wagner said many of the company's intensive care units are in Sun Belt states, ``areas where there has been significant population growth.''
It's possible that growth has been slowing in the down economy or couples are postponing having children, but the Pediatrix executives didn't want to venture an explanation when pressed by analysts.