Oxford getting $35M freestanding emergency department McLaren Health Care building facility to capitalize on scarcity of health care in community

BY DUSTIN WALSH

As populations continue to push farther into the suburbs, health systems are expanding as well.

McLaren Health Care broke ground last month on a $35 million rebuild of its McLaren Oakland operations in Oxford, 17 miles north of its main hospital in Pontiac, and is constructing a freestanding emergency department.

e Grand Blanc-based health system is attempting to capitalize on the scarcity of health care in the Oxford community. Patients seeking hospital or emergency care have to travel north to Lapeer and Flint or south to Pontiac.

“For us, looking at the Oxford location, there is a much-needed increase in level of care and access to higher acuity services,” Tracey Franovich, president and CEO of McLaren Oakland, said in an interview. “A freestanding emergency department made sense to us, because it’s more comprehensive than the existing urgent care we have there. We see patients come from the Oxford area to our main campus in Pontiac, so it really seems to make sense to provide a higher level of care.” e construction of freestanding emergency departments has risen in popularity in recent years as health systems compete for more patient populations and aim to keep them within their networks.

“It’s an access point into the health system,” said Franovich. “ ere’s not a lot of access to care in Oxford and the population is growing fairly quickly, so having those ambulatory access points is really important, especially after the pandemic. People don’t want to go to the hospital, so we can provide them with better care with some type of diagnostic procedure or imaging and create an established relationship.”

Sparrow Health, which was acquired by University of Michigan’s Michigan Medicine last month, opened a freestanding emergency department in Okemos last year. e goal was to access patients who may be routed by emergency medical services to competing hospitals, such as McLaren Greater Lansing Hospital.

A freestanding emergency department is much cheaper to build than a hospital. Franovich pegged a freestanding emergency department at roughly $1 million per bay. A new hospital build in 2023 costs as much as $4 million per inpatient bed, ac- cording to John Bodine, managing director of Chicago-based advisory rm Huron Consulting Group.

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“Adding capacity is really expensive,” Bodine said.

In Oxford, McLaren Oakland will replace parts of its existing facility, which include an urgent care, and add more services, including more primary care operations as well as specialists in cardiovascular, gastrointestinal and orthopedics. Franovich

ENVIRONMENT called them the “bread and butter” of specialties. e emergency department build will result in a 54,000-square-foot facility that can accommodate upwards of 20,000 emergency visits annually. e new facility is expected to be open in fall 2024.

Contact: dwalsh@crain.com; (313) 446-6042; @dustinpwalsh