Cooperative plans to reopen closed Chippewa Valley hospital
Dr. Erik Dickson started his career 25 years ago at Hospital Sisters Health System St. Joseph’s Hospital in Chippewa Falls, one of two hospitals that closed in western Wisconsin last year.
He’ll soon have the opportunity to return. The Chippewa Valley Health Cooperative, formed after HSHS announced it was exiting western Wisconsin, plans to temporarily reopen the location as it works toward building a new hospital in nearby Lake Hallie.
“I learned and grew in that facility, and I’m extraordinarily excited to get back to work there,” said Dickson, a member of the cooperative’s board of directors.
Renamed the Chippewa Valley Cooperative Hospital, the site will start offering cancer, wound and select specialty care this fall.
Next summer, it’ll be a 30-bed hospital with an intensive care unit, 24/7 emergency care, medical-surgical services, a labor and delivery suite and diagnostic services.
The temporary hospital will be an on-ramp to the new 48-bed hospital, which the cooperative wants to open by early 2028.
Mike Sanders, managing director of 1100 Partners and former CEO of Monroe Clinic, is advising the cooperative. He said they’re talking with the U.S. Department of Agriculture about support as well as considering traditional bond financing.
The cooperative is one of a few groups looking to build in the region. Aspirus Health plans a hospital in Chippewa Falls, and Rogers Behavioral Health is eyeing a campus.
Dickson and Sanders spoke with Wisconsin Health News this week. Edited excerpts from the interview are below.
WHN: Why reopen the hospital before bringing a larger one to the area?
Sanders: We have people driving out of town and people in ambulance garages waiting for ER visits. The crisis is still here. By opening up the interim facility in Chippewa Falls, we can be providing services to the community a couple years faster than waiting for the new hospital to be built.
That’s our long-term plan, and we’re still moving forward with that. This is strictly in interim because of the age and the condition of the facility. But it’s going to be a big help to the community in terms of OB, cancer care, ER services, ICU — there’s a lot of needs we can meet pretty quickly.
Dickson: We’ve got 80 physicians plus other (advanced practice providers) who have been waiting for an acute care hospital to open back up. Most of us worked at Sacred Heart and/or St. Joseph’s. When those two hospitals closed, it displaced all of us from an acute care hospital as well.
It’s going to be wonderful for the community because of the amount of driving, transferring and waiting that people are doing for typical healthcare at this point. But it’s going to also be really good to get those of us that worked in the hospital back to work again.
Sanders: It’s going to be a significant economic boost, separate from the healthcare piece, which is the priority. But 1,400 people lost their jobs a little over a year ago. We plan to bring back 300 to 325 full-time equivalents when we open the interim hospital, and probably another 100 more jobs at the new facility. That’s a $30-plus million impact on the economy.
WHN: How did you decide on what services to bring back first?
Dickson: Infusions are one of the first things we’re planning on opening up because infusions also go along with cancer care, especially chemotherapy-type medications. Things like that are typically given in an infusion center. So one of the first things to open is going to be the infusion center as well as an oncology clinic.
The hope is, within the next 10 to 12 months, to also have a linear accelerator for radiation oncology, as well as the wound clinic, which was a staple of St. Joseph’s for greater than 15 years. One of the best wound clinics in the valley shut down when St. Joseph’s shut down. We still have the physician who ran that clinic, and she’s going to come back. We’ll get the wound clinic with two hyperbaric chambers open back up again, hopefully in September or October.
Sanders: These are things that we can open more or less as a clinic. To provide ER, inpatient services, ICU and labor and delivery, we have to be licensed as a hospital. That’s basically about a year timeline. The driving force is implementation of the electronic health record. That’s driving our schedule: getting an EHR up and running.
And then we’ve got to buy a lot of equipment and hire a lot of people. We’re going to be very busy over the next 12 months.
WHN: How does this set you up to move to a new facility?
Sanders: This is going to make it easier … In this case, it’s a replacement hospital. We’ll have staff in place. We’ll have a structure. We’ll have contracts. We’ll have vendors. We’ll have equipment. Our goal is to transfer 90 percent of what we buy to open St. Joe’s over to the new facility. When HSHS left, they took most of the stuff on wheels, which is fine. It went to some of their other sites and things.
The equipment that we have to replace, most of it is movable. The radiation therapy is a little different. That’s a different kind of animal there because it’s a fixed placement. But our goal is to not leave too many dollars behind, so that we’re making good use of the community support we’ve received.
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