Cleveland medical mart: Four questions MMPI should answer

A Nov. 9 meeting of the Cuyahoga County Council will give MMPI, the property developer behind Cleveland’s medical mart project, its first opportunity in several months to give a public update on the project’s business plan.

It’ll also provide an opportunity for council members to subject officials with Chicago-based MMPI to some much-needed scrutiny. Confusion over the $465 million project’s future has reigned in recent weeks, thanks largely to seemingly contradictory statements in two media interviews by Brian Casey, general manager of the Cleveland Medical Mart & Convention Center.

In case council members haven’t been paying attention (or if they just want to score some political points with constituents frustrated with the taxpayer-funded medical mart project), here are four suggested lines of questioning:

Has the business model changed? We know the likely answer to this: No. Here’s what County Executive Ed FitzGerald told The Plain Dealer: “There is not a new business plan or a new strategy. But communication on the implementation of the business plan has been poor.”

But the question persists simply because Casey seemed to indicate the mart was shifting focus to a medical education center, away from its original plan for a collection of medical technology products showrooms. So, even though we probably know the answer, we need to hear it from MMPI. And that brings us to our next question.

What was Casey talking about? From the beginning of the medical mart discussion, one of MMPI’s big selling points was that it could simply replicate in healthcare what it had done with other marts for the furniture and design industries. That’s why the following statement Casey made to Scene was so confusing: “The key part is that this is not intended to be modeled after marts that show furniture or marts that are design centers. It’s a mistake to take a model that works well in one area and try to plug it into an industry that doesn’t work that way.”

Contrast that with a 2007 statement from MMPI’s former president Chris Kennedy. He sold the medical mart concept — and the idea that MMPI was the right one to implement it — by calling the collection-of-product-showrooms approach “a successful formula we’ve proven time and again.”

So, is the medical mart based on that “successful formula” or not? MMPI is going to have a tough time reconciling Casey’s recent statements with what other company officials have been publicly saying for years.

Why not change the model — and just admit it? There’s no shame in trying one idea, acknowledging it’s not working out as planned, scrapping it and going with another approach. Simply put: The medical product showrooms concept isn’t working. Few prospective tenants have shown interest, most that have were small Ohio firms, and the concept doesn’t even fit with how most hospitals make their purchasing decisions. For a project that was supposed to be all about attracting hospital customers, that’s not good.

So, why not forget about trying to sell medical technology and become a center for medical education? Maybe it’s just the pivot the medical mart and convention center need to succeed. Medical education seems like a stronger bet to draw a number closer to the long-promised 300,000 visitors per year, though that number has always been very much in doubt (but that’s another story).

The bigger problem for MMPI may be that it’s essentially painted itself into a corner. Subtly place more of an emphasis on education without publicly and unequivocally embracing the identity as a medical education center and the medical mart’s marketing message to potential educational customers and tenants becomes muddled. Announce a wholesale change to the approach and MMPI will be accused by taxpayers of a bait and switch — even if the switch ends up being better than the bait.

Why can’t you publicly identify even one committed tenant? In MMPI’s defense, there may be an easy explanation for this one — there are no committed tenants. But that isn’t clear. Casey said in September that MMPI had sent leases — not nonbinding letters of intent — to 37 prospective tenants. Have any signed? If so, what’s stopping MMPI from publicly naming them? Don’t say it’s for competitive reasons because top competitor Nashville has already announced several tenants with signed leases. If no tenants have signed yet, will MMPI commit to publicly identifying them once they do? Revealing some names would go a long way toward building back a little taxpayer trust that MMPI has squandered with its “poor” communication, as FitzGerald called it.