By Stephen Smoot
Pendleton County residents who need a broad spectrum of health care services will soon have a new option in Elkins. Last week, the West Virginia University Medicine leadership team and regional dignitaries broke ground on the Elkins Corridor Medical Center on North Randolph Avenue just south of the city’s main exit on Corridor H.
Dr. David Hess, president and chief executive officer of Bridgeport-based United Hospital Center, a WVU Medicine facility, said, “What we are bringing to Elkins is incredible health care. More importantly, we bring access.”
He described the new facility as a “hospital without beds,” meaning that it would offer everything that a typical hospital would, minus overnight stays and surgeries. Services offered include primary care, urgent care, infusions, imaging, and more.
“As we grow, we increasingly try to have care points that complement each other,” explained Dr. Albert Wright, president and CEO of the West Virginia University Health Care System. He went on to say that WVU Medicine, almost unique among “academic” health care systems, makes a priority of bringing specialists to rural areas.
He stated that physicians may base themselves at Elkins Corridor Medical Center, Grant Memorial Hospital, or Potomac Valley Hospital (WVU Medicine’s facility near Keyser). Specialists, such as cardiologists, can then rotate days at regional centers. This brings a higher standard of care to rural areas while also giving WVU Medicine an advantage in recruiting medical talent and experience to the Mountain State’s more remote regions.
“This way, we can recruit a doctor. We don’t care what county you live in,” added Wright.
It also helps physicians who grow up in small towns to develop their careers in, or closer to, the towns in which they grew up.
Hess described most similar health care systems as a “vacuum,” in that they pull the most complex medical cases and patients with major problems to their cores or hubs for treatment. WVU Medicine prefers to decentralize in what Hess called a “blower,” pushing such cases to the regional and more rural sites, ultimately making health care access easier and more convenient for the patient.
He went on to say that keeping specialists in the main facilities harms remote patients, saying, “We all know that people with health issues struggle to make appointments.”
The idea to build the Elkins facility came, Hess said, from WVU Medicine patients themselves. Over the years, they said, “We want more specialists” in facilities closer to them.
