Business people hear info on VW Health

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

Local business people had the chance to tour the Van Wert Health North facility and clinic and learn about retirement investing during a Van Wert Area Chamber of Commerce Coffee held Friday morning.

Van Wert Health President/CEO Jim Pope was on hand to talk about the hospital’s North facility, as well as to provide information on its new $40-million hospital expansion project.

Pope first talked about the Van Wert Health North facility, noting that when the building was being planned, the hospital administration and board looked at meeting four tests, with the first test being high tech, the second test high touch, the third test high quality, and the fourth test affordability.

“How do you create an environment that meets all four of those criteria,” Pope said of what hospital officials considered while in the planning stage for the facility.

The Van Wert Health president/CEO said the high tech portion of the facility can be best represented by the North facility’s 1.2-tesla MRI.

“You can’t buy a more field strength open MRI than what we have here,” Pope said.

The “high touch” test is met in several ways, including the way the rooms were arranged at the facility to provide patient privacy, but also make it easy for those treating patients to do their jobs.

“We really tried to think of allowing multiple things to go on in the space, but not bother the patient with it,” Pope added, noting that while many things are happening behind the scenes, the patient is not really aware of that.

That also allows the staff to handle more patients at the North facility than at a typical doctor’s office building.

The high quality piece comes in how patients are treated at the facility, and the quality of care they receive, he added, while the affordability comes in the way the North facility was set up: as a walk-in clinic instead of an urgent care facility such as the hospital’s ER department. That affordability component includes the fact that visits to the clinic are billed to insurance companies the same as a doctor’s visit.

“So if you have insurance and you have a $25 co-pay, that’s what’s you pay when you come here,” Pope noted. “You want to get an MRI here, it won’t cost you more than $600; at the hospital, it’s a little more.”

The hospital executive then went on to talk about the new hospital expansion project, noting that the expansion will provide a state-of-the-art health care facility for area residents.

Pope noted that he has been visiting the sample rooms set up on the fourth floor of the current hospital facility to test placement of equipment in the new facility and was looking at some of the new technology being looked at.

“It is second to none,” he said of the equipment being looked at.

Although Pope noted that “affordable health care” is sort of an oxymoron, since all health care is expensive, Van Wert Health is doing what it can to make health care as affordable as possible.

It will be something that you’re not used to in this area,” Pope said, adding that the project is about two years away from completion. “It takes a while to build something of that magnitude.”

Pope also noted that Van Wert Health has opened a new walk-in pediatric clinic in the pediatric office located in the medical facility on Fox Road. The clinic is open from 11 a.m. until noon, Monday through Friday.

Eric Hurless, a local representative for Edward Jones, also provided a presentation on retirement planning and provided a general idea of what is needed when deciding how to plan to provide enough money to live on at that time in life.