In 2021, ESI completed an economic impact study for St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. The purpose of this study was to express the many positive impacts that the hospital produces for its local community, the city of Philadelphia, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. At the time, St. Christopher’s sought public sector support to ensure continued operations, making it critical to understand what is gained from the hospital’s work, and conversely what would be lost if St. Christopher’s were to close.
St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children opened in 1875 as a charitable ambulatory clinic, serving walk-ins from its surrounding community in response to a glaring void in pediatric healthcare access. Today, St. Christopher’s Hospital is a 188-bed hospital that serves children throughout the region but has remained close to its roots, providing comprehensive services to families in need.
In 2019, St. Christopher’s was purchased through a partnership of Drexel University and Tower Health. Its function as a teaching hospital has been strengthened through that partnership and from connections to such institutions as Temple University School of Medicine, Villanova University, Thomas Jefferson University, Holy Family, LaSalle University, and Albert Einstein Medical Center.
ESI’s research utilizes data from St. Christopher’s Hospital, verified through the parallel use of publicly available third-party information. Our work relies on standard economic and social impact techniques, including input-output modeling. Where available and appropriate, multiple years’ worth of data were reviewed to present the best approximation of current annualized impacts of St. Christopher’s Hospital.
St. Christopher’s Hospital is a significant economic engine. Its impacts reverberate well beyond the economic activity, employment, and tax revenues generation its operations and capital investments represent. It fulfills a critical role as a teaching hospital, training the next generation of health care workers and helping ensure the sustained competitiveness of the Philadelphia region as a hub of health care resources and educational activity.
Since the initial 2021 report produced by ESI, St. Christopher’s has been able to strengthen its connection to the communities it serves, grow its operating footprint, and actualize much of its aspirational capital investment plans. As it continues to trend in this direction and follows through on stakeholder relations, the hospital benefitted from updated impact estimates that reflect current inputs and how they compare to previous impact levels.
ESI produced a brief internal memo that provided updated impact estimates, compared to the initial 2021 results that were provided in a detailed technical report.
