WVU Medicine opening Greene clinic Monday
Rick Shrum/Observer-Reporter
Participants in a ceremonial ribbon-cutting over the summer head inside for tours of the new WVU Medicine center in Franklin Township.
Rick Shrum/Observer-Reporter
This X-Ray suite will be among services rendered at the new WVU Medicine Center in Greene County.
Courtesy of West Virginia University Health System
An aerial shot of the new WVU Medicine health center that opened last month in Franklin Township, Greene County
Rick Shrum/Observer-Reporter
The WVU Medicine facility is scheduled to open Monday in Franklin Township, Greene County.
Rick Shrum/Observer-Reporter
Greene County Commissioner Blair Zimmerman speaks Friday at the ceremonial groundbreaking for the WVU Medical center that will open Monday.
Rick Shrum/Observer-Reporter
Albert Wright, president and chief executive officer of West Virginia University Health System, speaks Friday during an event in Greene County.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the WVU Medicine name.
WVU Medicine is poised to go Greene.
West Virginia University Health System, which operates under the name WVU Medicine, will begin operations Monday morning at its new outpatient center in Greene County. The end product of this $13.8 million project is a 24,300-square-foot facility that will provide primary, specialty and urgent care services for Western Pennsylvanians on their home turf.
It sits on a tract along Murtha Drive in Franklin Township, a quarter-mile above the Walmart store outside Waynesburg. Construction was completed almost exactly 16 months after groundbreaking – on schedule.
For the Morgantown-based health system, this is a major move across the Mason-Dixon. And a convenient one, to be sure, for local patients as well as professionals tending to them. Franklin Township is a mere 20- to- 25-minute drive from the mother ship, via Interstate 79, for physicians and staff of WVU Medicine who will serve there and other locations.
The system already had a presence in the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania, albeit a small one through a recently formed partnership. Since July, WVU Medicine has provided emergency room staff and other medical specialists to Uniontown Hospital, which shut down its maternity center in June and likewise is a half-hour commute away. WVU Medicine also is looking into adding an obstetrics unit in Uniontown.
Friday morning, though, the new Greene facility was the proud centerpiece of a ceremonial ribbon-cutting.
“This is our first sizable clinic in Western Pennsylvania,” said Darin Rogers, vice president of ambulatory operations. “We’ve looked at this as a great opportunity and believe this will be a win-win for both sides. We think people will be impressed when they walk into this facility, which is similar to the one we opened in Fairmont two years ago.”
Monday’s launch will give the system a portfolio of nine hospitals and four centers in three states. All but two of those 13 facilities are in the Mountain State, the exceptions being Greene County and a center in Garrett County, Md.
A number of patients from Southwestern Pennsylvania are already familiar with WVU Medicine, though – especially J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital, the system’s hub in Morgantown. Many of them from Greene, Washington and Fayette counties now will get their medical services closer to home.
“It will be an easy commute from Greene County to Morgantown and vice-versa for our doctors and nurses,” Rogers said.
He said WVU Medicine has been “well received in Greene and Fayette counties,” and statistics from the system appear to underscore that. Figures show that in 2017, the system’s outpatient clinics saw a total of 65,988 patients from Greene, Washington and Fayette. Last year, that figure rose to 85,131, an increase of 19,143 or 29%.
Of those 85,131 from the three counties, 38,000 were Greene residents.
The Franklin center will provide a wide spectrum of care. About 15,000 square feet of the facility will be devoted to six specialty clinics: primary care (internal medicine); cardiology and vascular; orthopaedics; obstetrics and gynecology; podiatry; and radiology.
Diagnostic services will feature echocardiograms; electrocardiograms; lab testing; stress testing; and X-ray.
There also are 30 exam rooms and six procedure rooms.
MedExpress Urgent Care, already established in the township, will relocate to the new center and occupy about 3,700 square feet. The remaining approximately 5,000 square feet will accommodate future growth.
This new center, according to a health system news release, has resulted in the creation of 21 jobs, most of which went to Greene County residents.
Some of the medical professionals slated to work there have a measure of familiarity with the Keystone State, including Sanford Emery, M.D.
Emery, chair of West Virginia University’s Department of Orthopaedics, said his faculty “has covered” Waynesburg University sports teams for seven or eight years. “We’ve been in the community already with Waynesburg,” he said. “Another thing, a number of our people working (in Morgantown) live in Waynesburg.”
Michael Campsey, another WVU physician, is quite familiar with this corner of Penn’s Woods. He was on staff at Washington Hospital for 16 years before joining WVU Medicine. Campsey was president of the medical staff and chief of cardiology when he left Washington in 2017.
He is the Northern Region director for the WVU Heart and Vascular Institute’s Division of Cardiology, and a major conduit for the Franklin center. “Dr. Campsey is helping to lead our strategy in this region,” said Vinay Badhwar, M.D., executive chair of that institute.
As director, Campsey will help serve WVU Medicine patients from all over Western Pennsylvania, including Butler and Erie. The presence of the Franklin facility will benefit patients traveling longer distances, enabling them to see a doctor there instead of Morgantown, cutting 50 miles off a roundtrip.
The unveiling of this new center, of course, is viewed by some health-care observers as a competitive endeavor by WVU Medicine. Washington Health System, parent of Washington Hospital, operates WHS-Greene a half-mile away. Two other systems – UPMC and Allegheny Health Network – are prominent throughout Western Pennsylvania.
Albert Wright, president and chief executive officer of WVU Medicine, denied that in a February interview with the Observer-Reporter.
“We primarily take care of a rural population from West Virginia,” Wright said then. “We made an active decision to go into border counties (in Pennsylvania). Being in Greene County, Washington County and Fayette County makes a ton of sense. We’ve always gotten patients from those counties.”
On Monday, though, his health system will have a larger local presence. And Campsey is gung ho about it.
“We’re bringing great providers to patients and creating an environment to really take care of people, instead of causing them to worry about things like ‘What type of insurance does a patient have?’ This takes away a lot other concerns patients may have.
“We try to make the experience the way it was designed.”
The experience will begin Monday.