Hospital continues growth
As part of Grand Lake Health System’s mission to better serve its community, their new building on South Knoxville Avenue will be completed in the spring of next year.
The project broke ground in late 2019 after demolition of the former Vancrest of St. Marys nursing home that sat on the lot previously.
“We immediately began our site prep after the demolition was done,” said Cindy Berning, Grand Lake interim CEO. “Around January we started that prep. We’re probably about halfway through the project right now; we are expecting to be done at the end of April and beginning of May.”
There will be several practices in the new building with one of them being Primary Care St. Marys which will be Drs. Dawn McNaughton and Michael Josey.
Dr. Kenneth Bryant, general surgery, will be occupying a suite as well as Grand Lake OBGYN.
“We also have a wing that will have a small onsite lab as well as administrative offices for our chief medical officer,” said Berning.
Berning said the building will also house Grand Lake’s family practice, area for conference room space and one wing will sit empty that will be used for future growth.
The building will be utilized for existing staff but could see additions down the road.
“Currently we are just going to utilize it with existing staff. When you grow and kind of expand your space, you’re really hoping to expand the volume of the patients that you can handle in that space,” said Berning. “So it will all be volume-dependent on whether or not we need to additional jobs at a later time.”
Berning is in her second month in the interim CEO role following the retirement of Kevin Har
lan on Sept. 4. Harlan left to become president of Premier Health’s Upper Valley Medical Center.
She said the transition to CEO has been a smooth one.
“It’s been going well. We have a really great team here,” said Berning. “We don’t make decisions in a bubble. I rely on my experts to help me make decisions and it’s been a great learning experience for me and everybody’s been very welcoming and really fantastic to work with.”
Berning said that it was not a challenge for her to take over, even during a pandemic, because the hospital works as a team so she never felt like she had to figure anything out on her own.
“With this being a smaller, community hospital, many of us wear many different hats and we never did work in a silo. We’ve been working as a team from the very beginning of this pandemic,” she said. “That per se was not a challenge for me because we’ve been working together as a team from the very beginning.”
Grand Lake Health rolled out its telehealth services earlier this spring and Berning said it has been well-received by the community. Telehealth allows health care providers to virtually see patients through devices like a computer or a phone without them having to go into the office.
“It’s been going very well. We have different areas that have been able to capitalize on that and really in this current environment, needed to provide options for patients so that they felt safe in getting care,” she said. “Many of our physician practices have been able to implement as well as our urgent care. It’s going well.”
She said the biggest obstacle with telehealth has been some of the population not having access to the right type of technology, adding that older patients hold a large percentage in ones that use the service.
“What we’ve been surprised to find is we that we have a very large percentage of our telehealth visits are actually the older population. We’re very impressed with that fact that they were able to jump on board with that,” said Berning. “It was a surprising trend but great to see.”
As far as other additions or program expansions, Berning said the hospital is continually monitoring the community to see if there’s any services that residents are leaving the area for.
“Does it make sense for us to investigate those services that they are leaving the community for and be able to offer it closer to home? That’s an ongoing process all the time and we do that when we’re determining any facility updates and addition projects as well,” she said. “We really do strive to be the very best primary care in the region and the community’s preferred choice for health care so that always plays in to all our analyses and decisions on what we might to in the future in terms of services and projects.”