Frederick medical campus gets second opinion

We’ve been down this road before, but maybe this time it will stick.

Last month, Longmont United Hospital and Poudre Valley Health System announced they would partner to build a new medical campus in Frederick. The announcement came almost exactly two years after North Colorado Medical Center in Greeley withdrew its short-lived plan to build a medical campus in the rapidly growing southwestern Weld County community.

NCMC had announced its plans in April 2008, when the storm clouds of the oncoming recession were still off in the distance. But by the end of July, NCMC and Banner Health officials decided the timing was not propitious and shelved the project. Phoenix-based Banner has a contract to operate NCMC.

However, at the same time that NCMC was agonizing over whether to pull its just-announced project, PVHS and LUH were in talks to develop a similar medical campus in Frederick.

“Honestly, we didn’t know they were looking at it,´ said Pam Brock, PVHS’s vice president of marketing and strategic planning. “When they made their announcement, we were in the middle of subsidence studies of some properties in the area.”

Because the Tri-Towns of Frederick, Firestone and Dacono are in a former coal-mining region, the area is honeycombed with old mineshafts. Brock said the first piece of property the partners looked at was rejected because of possible unstable soil.

Eventually, a 70-acre parcel was found near the intersection of Interstate 25 and Colorado Highway 52, and Longmont United purchased the site for $7.19 million last year. It is located within a mile of the 50-acre site NCMC considered buying in 2008.

LUH announced its plans to build a medical campus in Frederick in October 2009. At the time, it did not mention any involvement by PVHS, even though both hospital systems had been talking for years behind the scenes about a possible partnership.

It wasn’t till Aug. 16 that officials of both systems jointly announced they would partner 50-50 on the costs of building the Frederick campus. Both systems’ top administrators said health-care reform and the cost-containment aspects of the legislation made the difference for them to cooperate on serving the region’s fastest-growing area.

“Our two organizations decided it was more beneficial to work together,´ said PVHS CEO Rulon Stacey.

“In our case, we have two remarkable organizations with similar missions – providing high-quality care and service for a vast expanse of communities – and we’ve taken a very close look at the future of health care and decided it’s better to work together than to be competitors,´ said Mitch Carson, LUH CEO.

The Tri-Towns area grew at a rapid pace prior to the recession, with Frederick growing about 12 percent annually during the last decade. The town is projected to have about 60,000 residents by 2030.

And that’s an attractive market for both LUH, located about 15 miles away in Longmont, and for PVHS, which owns Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland about 25 miles to the north on I-25.

“That area is projected to be the fastest-growing area in Northern Colorado and it certainly was a few years ago,” Brock said. “It’s slowed down, but it’s still projected to be a high-growth area. Our goal is to provide services to those people and keep them closer to home.”

As it was two years ago, news of a medical campus coming to the area is being met with open arms. “This is a wonderful opportunity offered to residents of our region by two strong, longtime health-care providers in Northern Colorado,´ said Frederick Mayor Eric Doering. “The campus will fill a need for convenient medical services that have been absent in our area.”

Brock said a site plan is being developed for the campus and she could not predict whether it would include a full-service hospital. The first building to be constructed will likely be an urgent care facility, she said.

“Long term – 10 years or longer down the road – we’d like to provide as full-service a campus as possible, based on the need and the number of rooftops,” she said.

Brock said the partners are planning to do a groundbreaking on the site during the second quarter of 2011 and open the first campus facility in the second quarter of 2012.

Bill Byron, Banner Health spokesman, said the LUH-PVHS announcement shows the area’s ongoing attractiveness to medical service providers.

“I would say clearly Northern Colorado continues to be a pretty vibrant place and this demonstrates that,” he said.

But Byron said Banner has no immediate plans to construct any facilities in the Tri-Town area after its 2008 experience. “All I can say is we’re not looking at that now,” he said.

Steve Porter covers health care for the Northern Colorado Business Report. He can be reached at 970-232-3147 or at sporter@ncbr.com.

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