Work begins on Sullivan County hospital expansion
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Sullivan County Community Hospital has begun construction on an estimated $70 million expansion that its CEO says is designed to expand access to care.
The expansion will include a new, freestanding medical office building along with an addition to the rear of the main hospital building.
The current hospital opened in 1999, and Michelle Franklin said, “Since that time, we’ve added services. We’ve grown the business of the hospital so much so that we just simply don’t have any space.”
In an interview with Inside INdiana Business, Franklin said the hospital is working to overcome barriers many in the community face, particularly if they have to go out of town for a procedure.
“We have had, I think, more challenges to transportation,” she said. “I think we’ve really done a great job of trying to forecast the needs, both from a primary care perspective, a specialty care perspective, to try to bring as many services to this hospital, to this campus that would bring value to our community and not force people to leave.”
The 30,000-square-foot medical office building, when complete, will become home to the hospital’s pain management services, but will also have space for several new family medicine practitioners that will be joining the hospital system in 2025.
“It also gives us a little bit of freedom, because a fair majority of this space will be shelled to allow us to evaluate service lines that are inside the hospital that may need moved because they’ve outgrown their location,” Franklin said.
The second phase of the expansion is a modernization of the current hospital facility, which is part of the hospitals master planning process.
The addition to the building will include new pharmacy, radiology and surgery spaces, as well as other modalities, Franklin said.
Along with the added space and new or expanding services comes a need for talent, which Franklin said has been a struggle for the hospital like many other employers. But she adds that the hospital has made a concerted effort to improve its talent attraction efforts.
“Our organization has done a really good job since about 2016, with a very deliberate effort to do a cultural transformation inside our four walls,” she said. “As a result of that, what we’ve seen is that our patient volumes have gone up, our net revenue has gone up, our patient satisfaction scores have gone up. And so we know that the movement that we started in 2016 is a real thing, that has demonstrated proven results.”
Franklin said while the expansion project primarily tackles access to primary care and growth of the hospitals existing service lines, it doesn’t do much to address specialty services, which officials hope will be the next challenge to overcome.
“We have an interest in bringing specialists that are employed physicians to our market, and part of not being able to do that today is the space challenges that we have,” she said. “So I think as we move people out to this new medical office and as we move service lines around inside the hospital proper, then I hope that gives us an opportunity to look at specialty care and recruiting that group of physicians.”
A timeline for construction to be complete was not immediately available.