Maimonides Infants and Children’s Hospital and SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn are exploring the idea of creating a boroughwide pediatric hospital.

Discussions have been “very preliminary,” says Dr. Steven Shelov, vice president of the Maimonides pediatric facility. A SUNY Downstate spokesman confirms that there have been talks but says that it would be premature to disclose details.

Maimonides is the smallest of the four children’s hospitals in the city. Pooling its resources with those of SUNY Downstate’s pediatrics department could create a children’s hospital on par with the other specialized centers: Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital in Manhattan, which is affiliated with New York-Presbyterian; The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx; and Schneider Children’s Hospital in Queens, which is part of the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System.

Children’s hospitals typically are not big moneymakers, but they do attract donors and bring prestige. Having at least 140 to 150 beds allows a hospital to attract patients and subspecialists from a wide area. Larger facilities also can better afford expensive equipment.

The growth of specialized hospitals stems from changes in children’s health care. Because many illnesses that once required long hospital stays can now be treated on an outpatient basis, hospitalizations of kids are declining: They have fallen 40% over the past decade, says the National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions. As a result, general hospitals have been paring back or closing their pediatrics units. Children who do require hospitalization need more complex care, and the specialized hospitals are grabbing a growing share of that market.

A larger children’s hospital in Brooklyn could be a decade away, Dr. Shelov says, even if the current discussions bear fruit.

(Crains New York / YWN-Lipas)