Dignity Health to expand with medical offices, surgery center south of Highway 50 in Folsom
Dignity Health announced Thursday that it plans to build a medical office building that has capacity to do outpatient surgery and imaging on 30 acres it acquired near East Bidwell Street and Alder Creek Parkway in Folsom.
The new facility is the latest expansion announcement from the health care company, a unit of Chicago-based CommonSpirit Health. Dignity has said it plans to build a hospital in Elk Grove by 2027, when it would then shutter Methodist Hospital in south Sacramento. The company also has expanded its neonatal intensive care unit at Mercy San Juan Medical Center in Carmichael.
The new property will expand upon Dignity’s already-large presence in city where it operates Mercy Hospital of Folsom and a number of medical office buildings on and around that campus. The hospital, located at 1650 Creekside Drive, is about 3 miles from the new property.
Construction will begin in late 2022 and the facility is scheduled to open in 2023, officials said at a news conference.
“We’re taking the opportunity to grow as the community grows,” said Laurie Harting, the chief executive officer of Dignity’s Greater Sacramento division. “We’re already in Folsom. We have a pretty strong presence. We’ve been there for 40 years, providing health care to the Folsom community, and with all this growth happening south of (Highway) 50, we know that the health care needs are going to grow and we want to be a part of that.”
Harting said the cost of expanding on the current hospital site was really very high for what they would get, so they began to look around at other land that would be available in Folsom.
“I think there are going to be over 10,000 new homes in this Folsom Ranch area,” Harting said, “and so figuring that there will be about 3.5 to 4 people per home, that’s a lot of growth, and when you have that many more people, they need to have health care services. This land is centrally located to where all that growth is happening.”
Harting said that Dignity has no plans to downsize the office space elsewhere in Folsom when the new office building comes online.
“The hospital itself has been running quite full before COVID, and especially when it comes to the surgery department,” she said. “That was a very busy department, so with the growth in the population we’re expecting with those new homes, we know we would not have enough space to accommodate all that growth. That’s why we’re adding a surgery center in that new medical office building.”
Health care is changing, Harting said, and many more surgeries are moving to an outpatient arena. In the old days, she said, people would go into the hospital to have their gallbladder removed, and they would be in the hospital for seven to 10 days, but now because of the laparoscopic equipment, they go home the same day.
This story was originally published July 2, 2020 at 10:16 AM.
