NexCore Group has broken ground on a 67,000 square ambulatory care center for St. Alexius Medical Center (SAMC) in Minot, a North Dakota hub city near the booming Bakken Oil Formation that is experiencing extraordinary population growth. In 2014, the U.S. Census Bureau ranked Minot as the fifth fastest-growing micropolitan area in the nation.
NexCore is developing the two-story Minot Medical Plaza in collaboration with St. Alexius Medical Center, a 306-bed, full-service, acute care medical center located in Bismarck, that serves the residents of central and western North Dakota, northern South Dakota and eastern Montana.
SAMC has a strong reputation in Minot and currently provides the market with outpatient services in a converted one-story office building. During its six years of operation, the SAMC clinic has experienced consistent growth in patient visits. The new Medical Plaza will replace the existing clinic.
“The new Medical Plaza will allow SAMC to recruit additional physicians to the Minot community and provide specialty services that patients want closer to home,” says Todd Varney, Executive Managing Director of Development at NexCore Group. “The new facility and expanded services will definitely cut down on the time patients currently spend traveling from Minot to Bismarck for specialty services.”
“St. Alexius is proud to partner with NexCore for the development of our Minot Medical Plaza,” says Kurt Waldbillig, Vice President of Physician Services & Outreach at SAMC. “In a time of uncertainty in today’s healthcare, St. Alexius felt it was in our best interest to look to an outside entity to help with the development, design and financing of our facility. After our initial meeting with NexCore, it was apparent to us that NexCore was more than that. They invested time and money to make sure the product we were going to deliver was the right product for the community. The commitment to detail has been great, but their commitment to making sure we deliver a product that matches the mission of our organization has been most important. NexCore took the time to build a relationship with St. Alexius and working with them has been a great experience.”
Facility Programmed and Designed to Enhance Patient Outcomes
The Minot Medical Plaza has been designed as a multi-purpose ambulatory center that will foster an efficient and collaborative care model to increase staff, physician and patient satisfaction. The building space program includes primary care and specialty clinics (including orthopedics, gastroenterology, and ophthalmology), physical/occupational therapy, diagnostic laboratory, diagnostic imaging (X-ray, mammography, MRI, CT), an ambulatory surgery center (ASC), and related support spaces.
The project design will foster cooperation among providers, which is intended to promote positive patient outcomes and increase operational efficiencies. The design supports an operational model that SAMC adopted after undertaking LEAN planning exercises in an effort to eliminate waste and improve clinical performance. For example, the larger floor plates of the facility will enable the primary care and full-time specialty physicians to practice on the same floor, reducing the number of employees to an optimal level, while the open plan of each care module will foster collaboration among staff and providers.
The front entry of the facility will feature an atrium area with central check-in. Primary care and specialty clinics will be the predominant uses on the first floor, with ambulatory surgery, imaging and lab services housed on the second floor.
The building design also incorporates features that will enable SAMC to roll out initiatives such as its EPIC electronic health records system, patient tracking capability within the facility, self-rooming and shortened wait times.
About St. Alexius Medical Center
St. Alexius Medical Center is a 306-bed, full-service, acute care medical center offering a full line of inpatient and outpatient medical services, including primary and specialty physician clinics, home health and hospice services, durable medical equipment services, and a fitness and human performance center. Since its founding in 1885, St. Alexius Medical Center has been dedicated to serving the residents of central and western North Dakota, northern South Dakota, and eastern Montana. Besides the main campus located in Bismarck, St. Alexius owns and operates hospitals and clinics in Garrison and Turtle Lake, N.D., and manages the hospital and clinics owned by Mobridge Regional Hospital in Mobridge, S.D. St. Alexius also owns and operates a primary care clinic in Mandan, N.D., and specialty and primary care clinics in Minot.