Memorial Health System opened a new pediatric emergency department in Belpre on Jan. 2. (Photo by Michelle Dillon)

MARIETTA — Memorial Health System is bringing new facilities and services to the Mid-Ohio Valley.

In partnership with Akron Children’s Hospital, Memorial opened a new pediatric emergency department on Jan. 2 at its Belpre campus.

The emergency department has eight beds, a nurse’s desk, a triage room and a physician work station. It is open 2 p.m. to midnight seven days a week, according to Akron Children’s Division Director of Pediatric Emergency Medicine Laura Pollauf.

Pollauf said the pediatric emergency department is staffed by an Akron Children’s pediatric emergency medicine fellowship-trained physician, two Memorial Health System nurses, a respiratory therapist and a medical assistant working each shift.

Memorial Health System President and CEO Scott Cantley said most health care in the community starts in the emergency room and the Belpre pediatric emergency department is a strong starting point for all the other care that Memorial Health System can bring to the area.

Memorial Health System Director of Marketing Alexis Fazio shows off a proposed vision of the new Women and Children’s Hospital in Belpre that Memorial plans to open at the end of 2025. (File Photo)

“The first thing we wanted to do is bring that emergency, that crisis care,” Cantley said about the pediatric emergency department on its opening day. “A thing we’ve never had for children here in this region, a true pediatric ER, will be an absolute starting point and building block for everything else that comes later. This region has wanted something like this for years and years and years, this access to pediatric subspeciality care.”

One of the other things Memorial is bringing to the area is a new women and children’s hospital in Belpre. The hospital will be built on the site of the closed Toll Compaction facility on Farson Street and is being developed in partnership with Akron Children’s with a projected cost of $125 million in July 2023.

“When you think about the last 75 years in the Mid-Ohio Valley, we’ve delivered babies here for a long time, but over the last 75 years most pediatric care has begun to move toward speciality centers, children’s hospitals, if you will,” Cantley said.

He said pediatrics is becoming more subspecialized because parents want and expect the same kind of subspecialty care adults get for their kids. Parents in the area were taking their children to Akron and Columbus to get this care, so the pediatric emergency department was the first step to bringing that care here.

“Over the last few years, we started working with Akron Children’s to see if we could change that, if we could bring more pediatric support here to Marietta, and we arrived on this partnership saying if we can all work together that maybe now’s the right time for us to really expand,” Cantley said.

Belpre was chosen as the location of the pediatric emergency department and women and childrens’ hospital because it is in the center of areas like Marietta, Athens and Parkersburg, Cantley said.

Cantley said they are still in the architectural phase of building the women and children’s hospital.

“We are working with the state, and we are working with Akron Children’s, and we are preparing to tear down the manufacturing site here over the next couple months,” he said. “Probably by the end of March that site will be done, and we’ll be ready to start prepping the foundations (and) the ground for the foundations of the building.”

Cantley said the plan is to open the women and children’s hospital by the end of 2025.

Once the women and children’s hospital is built, the gynecology services that Memorial offers at its Marietta campus will be moved to Belpre in the existing building across the street from where the new women and children’s hospital will be. There will be a bridge connecting the two buildings, Memorial Health System Vice President of Physician Services and Chief Medical Officer Dan Breece said. Memorial is also building a facility in Athens County, with all the services offered in Belpre, like outpatient services; a freestanding emergency department; diagnostic access including CT, X-ray, MRI and nuclear medicine; all lab testing; and physician clinics, according to Cantley.

Memorial Health is going to build one four-story building to accommodate all these services. It will be located on Columbus Road in Athens near the intersection of U.S. 33 and Ohio 50, Cantley said.

According to Breece, the building will be approximately 100,000 square feet and cost $110 million.

Cantley said they will start with primary care and some specialties, such as rheumatology and then expand as the market reacts.

“We’re really excited,” Cantley said about the Athens facility. “We should open the first phase of this — which is the freestanding ER — we’ll open in May, June.”

Cantley said physician clinics and diagnostic services will open in mid- to late summer 2024.

Memorial Health is also building a new hospital on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River in Sistersville.

Memorial Health acquired Sistersville General Hospital in 2020, according to Breece.

“We knew that the building itself was old and it was tired,” Breece said.

Cantley said Memorial Health was “anxious to help Sistersville, who was really struggling to keep their doors open” when they bought the hospital.

They also knew they needed to freshen up the clinics in Middlebourne, Sistersville and St. Marys, Breece said.

“We’re currently in the design phase of that,” Breece said about the new hospital. “We expect that we’ll be able to open a new hospital there in the second half of the year in 2025.”

According to Breece, the new hospital will be located across the street from the existing hospital on property Memorial owns.

Memorial offers imaging services, an emergency room and limited inpatient services in Sistersville. The new hospital will allow them to offer more robust emergency services because there will be more space and they will be able to expand inpatient resources and offer procedural space for services like interventional pain, podiatry, orthopedics and expanded wound care, Breece said.

Building the new hospital will allow them to expand to up to 12 beds, as opposed to the eight beds the current hospital has. This will give nurses and doctors more resources to help patients, Breece said.

The new hospital will be two stories. The cost of the new hospital and of freshening up the clinics or possibly building new clinics is estimated at $30 to $35 million, Breece said.

“We’re thrilled to be able to make that kind of investment in Tyler County and see the next hundred years of that community continuing to be served,” Cantley said.

Memorial announced a new innovation in fall of 2023, according to Cantley.

“One of our newest innovations that I’m most excited about is this new partnership with the Mayo Clinic Care Network,” Cantley said.

Breece said Memorial Health joined the Mayo Clinic Care Network, which only has 60 members, because they wanted to offer a level of quality that has never been seen in the Mid-Ohio Valley.

By joining, Memorial Health has gained access to all the resources of the network, which includes 4,500 providers and the Mayo Clinic itself. Being a member allows doctors to reach out about a patient’s case and get information about whether they are on the right track or how they can work with the Mayo Clinic to help the patient.

If they want to start a new program at Memorial Health, they can reach out for information on how the Mayo Clinic runs the program. They also have access to all of the Mayo Clinic treatment protocols and pathways, according to Breece.

Smith said being a member of the network also is a great tool for staff because it gives them access to the Mayo Clinic’s patient education resources.

Breece emphasized that Memorial Health is still an independent health system and is not owned by the Mayo Clinic.

“We truly are investing all of our dollars here locally to keep care local.” Breece said.

Memorial Health Associate Vice President of Service Excellence Jennifer Offenberger said the new facilities are all part of Memorial’s mission of “bringing the care that people need to their community so they don’t have to travel. Our mission is to bring excellence to people’s backyard.”

Michelle Dillon can be reached at mdillon@newsandsenintel.com.