With hospital bursting at seams, new facility offers less-expensive services in easier to access setting
Nearly five years ago, leaders at Montrose Regional Health looked around the hospital built on South Third Street in 1949 and realized they had a good problem.
They needed more space.
Additions in the 1990s and mid-2000s helped. But nearly 250,000 square feet of hospital wasn’t enough to serve the needs of a growing Montrose and the surrounding San Juan Mountains communities. The Alpine Women’s Centre was out of room. Four operating rooms weren’t sufficient, especially with the growth in robotic surgical systems and the amount of room those machines require.
The hospital needed to bring in mobile units to perform magnetic resonance imaging and PET scans.
“We are so full at the hospital.
We need a relief valve,” said Leann Tobin, the hospital’s chief ancillary services and marketing officer.
The pandemic temporarily halted a solution. But the new four-story, 80,000-square-foot Montrose Regional Health Ambulatory Care Center is now open, providing a host of outpatient services and greater access to specialty care — care hospital leaders tout as less expensive.
A grand opening is scheduled for today (April 25) from 4:30 to 6 p.m.
For Ouray County residents, who made up roughly 9% of outpatient care at Montrose Regional Health last year, the Ambulatory Care Center — or ACC, as it’s been dubbed — has the added benefit of being on the south end of Montrose. The ACC’s location at 3330 S. Rio Grande Ave., across from Hobby Lobby in the River Landing Shopping Center, wasn’t by accident. Hospital officials learned the intersection of Townsend and Rio Grande avenues is the busiest in Montrose.
“We wanted to be easy for people to get to,” Tobin said.
The first floor of the ACC is dedicated to testing and imaging services, an additional location for the hospital’s Mountain View Therapy rehabilitation clinic and a general surgery practice. The second floor features the Alpine Women’s Centre and the Spine and Pain Center, the latter of which debuted last year. The third floor is occupied by Cedar Point Health, a private, physician-owned practice. The fourth floor, once it opens at the end of this summer, will feature a day surgery center, where procedures ranging from hernia repairs and sinus surgeries to colonoscopies can be performed.
One of the greatest benefits to patients is that treatments will generally be less expensive at the ACC than at the hospital.
Some patient fees for services at a hospital go toward keeping the facility open 24 hours a day.
“Care in a hospital is expensive. We are very aware of that,” Tobin said.
Montrose Memorial Hospital, Inc., the not-for-profit corporation, purchased 4.2 acres of land for the ACC for $1.25 million in 2022, according to Montrose County records. Tobin said the hospital wanted to own the building as well but couldn’t afford it, so NexCore Group, a Denver-based health care real estate developer, built and owns the facility. The hospital leases the building under a 75-year contract.
With the ACC open and operating, hospital leaders are turning their attention back to the main hospital campus and working on a master plan.
Long term, Tobin said, the plan is to move the hospital’s family center up to the fourth floor, creating more room for surgery areas. She said eventually the hospital wants to increase the number of operating rooms from four to seven.
