A hospital district in the mountains of Colorado is planning to replace a 25-bed critical-access hospital with one with two acute-care beds and an emergency department.
The St. Vincent General Hospital District in Leadville, Colo., near Vail, has applied for a $10 million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to build the replacement hospital, said Karen Onderdonk, the hospital's director of outreach and development.
The hospital nearly closed because of losses in 2014. But the operation won separate district and Lake County millage in 2015 that combined generate about $1 million annually and now have it operating in the black, Onderdonk said.
The nearest other clinics and emergency room are a 45-minute drive in good weather. Snow sometimes make roads impassable and even life flights unsafe, she said.
The hospital was founded in 1879 by the Sisters of Charity to care for a growing population of silver miners. The current facility opened in 1958 and was sold to the county in the 1970s.
Renovating the existing hospital was cost-prohibitive because it contains asbestos and has a dated footprint for technology hookup, Onderdonk said.
If the USDA loan can be secured, the district would begin construction as early as April and complete it in a year's time.
The district brought in Centura Health to manage the hospital in 2015 after a long-time clinical affiliation. The plan is to retain the 75 employees as district employees unless talks with Centura to make them Centura employees come to fruition, Onderdonk said. The hospital and associated primary-care clinic are staffed by five physicians and other providers.
Onderdonk said the new hospital will have an Epic electronic health records system consistent with that run at Centura.
Centura operates 17 hospitals in Colorado and western Kansas. It has about 6,000 affiliated physicians.
