Mercy Springfield Communities officials unveiled plans this month for two 60,000-square-foot facilities along the U.S. Highway 65 corridor, representing an investment of roughly $60 million. Demand for more localized services in Branson as well rehabilitation services in the Springfield area are driving the projects, according to hospital officials.
Following a Jan. 7 hearing, the Missouri Health Facilities Review Committee – within the state’s Department of Health and Senior Services – approved Mercy’s application to build the $28 million rehabilitation center. The 63,000-square-foot facility is planned just north of Evans Road and west of Highway 65 on 120 acres it shares with the Mercy Orthopedic Hospital currently under construction.
Mercy also plans to develop a 62,000-square-foot clinic on the former site of the Branson Inn motel. The $34 million project could encompass the old Oak Ridge Boys Theatre, Mercy spokeswoman Lisa Cox said, noting hospital officials are negotiating the sale of the theater property.
The Mercy moves come weeks after Skaggs Regional Medical Center officially converted to Cox Medical Center Branson under a strategic partnership the hospitals reached last fall. Cox Branson officials say Mercy’s plans still don’t fill the needs provided by a full-service hospital.
Rehab needs approvedKevin Rash, vice president of operations for Mercy in Springfield, is managing the development of the rehabilitation center. He said the Evans Road project represents the third partnership between Mercy and Brentwood, Tenn.-based Centerre Healthcare, which operates five rehabilitation hospitals. In partnership with Mercy, Centerre runs hospitals in St. Louis and started another in Oklahoma City last year, Rash said. “We were looking at our needs in Springfield, and we reached out to Centerre. From there, we decided this was what we wanted to do,” Rash said.
Under the joint venture, he said Centerre is responsible for administrative personnel, and Mercy would provide clinical staff such as nurses and physical therapists.
Currently, Mercy operates a 35-bed rehabilitation division at its Mercy Hospital Springfield campus. The new facility, Rash said, would have 60 beds and help Mercy meet the local demand for rehab services.
“I would say the need has been there for quite some time,” Rash said. “We felt there was a significant population we weren’t able to serve, and so this will allow us to help those patients who may have had to go outside of our community.”
In 2012, he said there were probably more than 1,000 patients who could have received rehabilitation services, but the hospital was only able to assist around 400.
General contractor McCarthy Building Cos. Inc., which is managing the adjacent orthopedic hospital construction, is leading construction on the rehab hospital. Rash said the groundbreaking is slated for March, and the hospital is expected to be finished in April 2014.
Branson expansionDr. Rob Steele, Mercy senior vice president of market growth and development, said plans for the two-story clinic at the corner of highways 248 and 65 in Branson are still largely in the works. He said demolition on the vacant Branson Inn, the site of the future clinic, is expected to begin in March. He said the construction should take about 18 months and may not begin until July 2014. “Our involvement in Branson is not exclusive to that one piece of property,” Steele said. “We’ll be expanding our primary care base around Branson, as well, which would likely include facility upgrades.”
Mercy plans to invest another $12 million in capital improvements in the Branson market. Mercy manages primary care facilities in Hollister, two in Branson – on state highways 165 and 248 – and another in Branson West. It also runs an orthopedic clinic on Bee Creek Road near Highway 65.
“With respect to the sub-specialty work that will occur (in Branson), that will be significantly expanded. For example, we don’t currently have surgical capacity. We will have surgeries down there. We don’t currently have imaging; we’ll have that down there,” Steele said.
He expects employees of the primary care center on 248 – which is about a mile away from the planned clinic – would move to the new location. Mercy officials, he said, haven’t yet decided whether they would close Mercy Clinic Family Medicine on 248.
Steele dismissed the notion that the moves in Branson are designed to better compete with CoxHealth’s new presence in town. Last year, Skaggs officials sought a strategic partnership with CoxHealth to help shore up its bottom line and improve buying power.
“It is addressing a need that we identified quite some time ago,” Steele said. “We began the discussion of our sub-specialty needs in Stone and Taney counties in 2008, and we are just now pulling the trigger.”
Cox Medical Center Branson President and CEO William Mahoney said he is focused on what Cox can do for the community.
“Community hospitals like Cox Medical Center Branson are committed to caring for everyone and providing a full range of needed, quality health care to the people they serve. Health care facilities with the more narrow mission of providing only more profitable outpatient care do not serve the community’s larger health care needs,” he said in a prepared email statement. “We hope and believe that our community will continue to support Branson’s only full-service hospital.”
Steele said the need for more outpatient services in Branson is real. “Honestly, you could ask anyone who lives down there, ‘Would you like your cardiologist to be in Branson?’ and they’d say, ‘Absolutely.’ ‘Would you like your dermatologist to be in Branson?’ ‘Absolutely,’” he said.
