After Maura Rosato, a restaurant cook, sliced her hand at
work not long ago, she weighed her health-care options thoughtfully.
"I could go to my doctor," she said last week.
"I could go to the emergency room. Or I could go here," she said,
nodding toward the sweeping stone-and-glass exterior of LourdesCare at Cherry
Hill, an ambulatory-care center on Route 70.
More than a doctor's office, less than a hospital,
capacious health-care facilities like this are sprouting along Route 70 in
Cherry Hill, earning it the nickname "Health Care Highway" from Mayor
Chuck Cahn.
"It's convenient," the 32-year-old Rosato, a
Haddon Heights resident, explained as she walked Friday across Lourdes' 400-car
parking lot. Her first experience here had been a good one, she said, so now
she was back to have a fluid buildup in her knee examined.
"I mean, it's not like I'm dying or anything,"
she continued. "But it might have taken me days to see my doctor."
LourdesCare, which in 2013 created this
56,000-square-foot facility at the intersection of Routes 70 and 41, was the
first of the large, multipurpose health-care facilities in the township.
It is not the last.
On Thursday, Virtua Health System cut a ribbon to mark
the formal opening of its Express Urgent Care facility and its family medicine
practice at 315 Route 70 East.
Next month, Penn Medicine will cut the ribbon on its
150,000-square-foot ambulatory-care facility, Penn Medicine at Cherry Hill,
which started seeing patients last Monday. It is situated where a Syms clothing
store stood, at 1865 Route 70 East.
And Cooper University Health Care has an application
pending before Cherry Hill's community development office to convert an office
building on Route 70 once occupied by Lockheed Martin Corp. into a
96,000-square-foot outpatient facility near the Crowne Plaza Hotel.
"Everybody saw the potential of what Lourdes
brought," Cahn said in an interview Thursday, soon after taking part in
the ribbon cutting at Virtua.
Cahn cited Route 70's proximity to the New Jersey
Turnpike and Route 295 as among the reasons such regional giants of health care
are locating to the township.
He noted that Kennedy Hospital - the township's only
full-scale hospital - is also in the midst of a major renovation on Cooper
Landing Road, a short distance from Route 70, and expects in its next phase to
add beds and a medical office building.
Kim Barnes, vice-president for planning and development
at Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center in Camden, said Cherry Hill's location
makes it especially attractive to health-care providers. "The majority of
our patients come from Camden, Burlington, and Gloucester Counties," she
said. And so, as it looked to situate a satellite operation outside the city
several years ago, "we drew a circle around all three counties, and the
sweet spot at the center was Cherry Hill."
The new building, facing both Brace Road and Route 70 on
the site of a long-vacant former supermarket "is not too far for anyone
who was our patient" at the hospital in Camden, Barnes said.
LourdesCare does not offer major surgery as the hospital
does, she said, but it has doctor's offices, which the hospital does not.
"So if people need follow-up care, they're just five miles away."
Rich Miller, president and CEO of Virtua, said his large
health-care system - he calls it the largest employer in South Jersey - had its
eye on expanding into Cherry Hill for the past five years.
"But we don't believe in plopping down anywhere. It
has to be the right location, and we felt this location was perfect."
About half the region's population does not have a
regular health-care provider, said Miller, so urgent- care facilities "are
very popular, especially for illnesses that are minor" and don't require
expensive emergency room visits.
Virtua's family medicine practice - a presence on Morris
Drive since about 2010 - relocated to its new Route 70 building in June. Its
urgent-care facility opened next door on Monday.
In addition to 25 primary-care offices across Burlington,
Camden, and Gloucester Counties, Virtua operates five other outpatient
facilities, three hospitals, two skilled nursing facilities, and a home
health-care agency.
But the new giant on "Health Care Highway" is,
for now, the Penn Medicine ambulatory-care facility.
Fronted in bright red, the 150,000-square-foot building
contains the Penn cardiac and kidney medicine practices and a general medicine
practice, which used to be about a mile west of the new site, as well as
obstetrics-gynecology practices that used to be in Haddonfield and Voorhees.
"Over the last 10 years we've learned that what
works best for us and for the patient is larger, more integrated sites where
people can get more services in one location," said Ron Barg M.D.,
executive director of Penn Medicine's clinical-care associates' ambulatory-care
network.
Workers were still installing walls on the first floor of
the building Friday, but Barg said it would have about 100 exam rooms when
completed and could accommodate about 200,000 patient visits a year.
"What you're seeing on Route 70 is the trend we're
seeing all over," said Barg, who praised the township's "cooperative
spirit."
He said he was particularly pleased that Cherry Hill had
accommodated Penn's request for a new access road that allows exiting drivers
to turn east or west onto the notoriously busy roadway.
"That was one of the conditions we put on the
developer," said Barg. "If we hadn't gotten it we wouldn't have
closed the deal.
"But we really wanted to be here," he said.
"It's the right space. It meets our needs."
Source: Philly.com
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