INTEGRIS broke ground Wednesday, Nov. 1, on the health care system’s first micro-hospital, which will be called INTEGRIS Community Hospital. It will be located at 3391 S. I-35 Service Road at the S. 34th Street intersection in Moore.
“We chose Moore as our first such location for a variety of reasons. It is one of the fastest growing, most progressive, most resilient communities in Central Oklahoma,” said INTEGRIS President and Chief Executive Officer Bruce Lawrence. “Also, we’ve owned this land since 2002.
We saw this area’s potential for growth and prosperity way back then and invested in 40 acres of land. We’ve just been waiting for the right project to come along and we believe this is the right project.”
Last October, INTEGRIS officials announced they would be working with Emerus to open small-scale, fully licensed inpatient hospital facilities in different quadrants of the metro, to bring high-quality care closer to home.
Each joint venture facility will be open 24-hours a day, seven days a week and will be equipped to respond to almost any medical issue a patient may present with; including those that may be life threatening or require complex, critical care.
Each will house between eight and 10 inpatient beds for observation and short-stay use, and include a similar number of emergency treatment and triage rooms, along with primary and specialty care physicians, diagnostic and other outpatient clinic services.
“What is a community hospital or a micro-hospital?” asked Vic Schmerbeck, the Executive Vice President of Business Development at Emerus. “We believe it’s a transformative concept that allows great health care systems like INTEGRIS to expand their reach further into communities by offering medical care in lower cost settings that are conveniently located where people live, work and play.”
While Wednesday’s groundbreaking was held at the future Moore location, it was meant to signify and celebrate all four of the community hospitals INTEGRIS plans to build in Central Oklahoma.
The three other planned locations are in Northwest Oklahoma City, Far West Oklahoma City and Del City. The Moore facility is scheduled to open in early 2019 and the remaining locations should be up and running by the end of that year. Additional INTEGRIS micro-hospitals could be on the horizon in the future.
