Area business leaders on Thursday got a chance to peek at the outline of the new MercyOne clinic that is slated to open next July in the former Herberger’s space at Northbridge Mall.

Leaders of the clinic led people on tours through a life-size structure built out of cardboard in the building. The methodology, known as 3P, will give architects, staff and community members the opportunity to see how the space will work for various patient care scenarios.

Teresa Mock, senior vice president of MercyOne Medical Group  — North Iowa, showed attendees where the clinic would expand with each phase of the expected five-phase project and gave a general layout of where services would be located. She said more cardboard walls are expected to be put in place the week of Nov. 4 ahead of a public open house Nov. 9.

“We’ve had a lot of fun the last couple days as you can imagine,” Mock said, noting there were probably about 25 people in the building from all levels at MercyOne, along with a group of architects, brainstorming and coming up with ideas for the space.

Once the cardboard walls are put up, they walk through the space, check the flow and see what works and what doesn’t.

“Everything is put in a very deliberate space,” she said.

Plans call for starting with a primary care clinic with visiting specialists and urgent care and will expand to include an imaging center, additional specialists, obstetric services and an ambulatory surgery center at the end of the fifth phase. When the clinic has reached that phase, it will utilize 40,000 square feet of the 64,000 square feet in the mall space.

Nate Jansen, president and CEO of Albert Lea Select Foods, said he attended one of the initial meetings with all of the department heads from MercyOne and was pleased with the level of collaboration he saw from all involved during the process.

“It was flat-out impressive,” Jansen said.

Mock said the design of the new clinic will be complete in a few weeks and will then be in the hands of architects for four to six weeks before the project is put out for bids. The construction is expected to take about six months.

 

‘We’ve got to keep control’

After the tours, MercyOne North Iowa President Rod Schlader and Mock took questions from the business leaders, and a group of Albert Lea business leaders expressed their support of the project to the crowd.

One person questioned where referrals will be made for specialists, and Mock said plans include several specialists on site, including ENT, urology, cardiology, dermatology and neurosurgery, in the clinic, and there has been interest from multiple other specialists including for diabetes, weight management and pediatrics.

If a patient needed a procedure that would require surgery, the patient would travel to Mason City and then return to Albert Lea for followup. Once the ambulatory surgery center is in place, outpatient surgeries would be completed in Albert Lea.

Mock said the clinic would see all types of patients, including those covered by Medicare.

Jansen, who is a trustee of the Albert Lea Healthcare Coalition, which will own the clinic space, talked about the increase in health insurance costs Select Foods and Quality Pork Processing have seen since 2011.

At that time, the companies started noticing a trend of employees using the emergency room more and upon further investigation, found out the reason was because of a shortage of primary care providers in both Mayo Clinic Health System in Albert Lea and Austin. He also noted that Albert Lea residents have 25% to 30% higher health insurance costs than what residents in the metro would pay. 

To battle this, Select Foods became part of a group of employers that banded together for a worksite clinic. He said the Mercy project takes these efforts to a whole different level and will save his business “a significant amount of money” in insurance costs.

Gerry Vogt, founder of Mrs. Gerry’s, said she is excited that Mercy is interested in coming to the community and said she thinks the added competition will help with the cost of insurance and health care.

Steve Tufte, chief financial officer of Innovance, said health care is his company’s third-highest expense. It, too, has taken part in the work-site clinic with a group of other local employers to try to counter some of the costs and has even had its employees travel to the Twin Cities for orthopedic or other surgical procedures because of cheaper costs.

Tufte, another trustee of the health care coalition, said the opportunity for Mercy to come to the community is an extension of what Innovance has tried to do in the last five or six years.

He said it is incumbent of employers, employees and community members to take advantage of Mercy’s clinic in the future.

He said for the project to become a reality, more funds need to be raised. He said the coalition — which is a group of business, community and civic leaders working to restore health care services, regain control of local health care options and reduce costs of health insurance — is hoping to collect $300 per employee from area businesses over a three-year commitment.

Funds the coalition raises will go to support the building purchase and renovations. The coalition will have 12 trustees, made up of small and large business professionals, former health care employers and city and county representatives, that will oversee the funds.

At the close of his remarks, Tufte presented Brad Arends, another trustee for the coalition and chairman of Save Our Healthcare, with a check from Innovance for $114,000 toward the project.

Arends said major fundraising efforts are just starting at the corporate and private level, and thus far 17 private employers have pledged $1.23 million in commitments toward the project. The Cuppage Foundation will pay $30,000 over the next three years for the project, and an anonymous donor, who is an Albert Lea High School graduate, has agreed to contribute $1 million. Arends said the anonymous donor’s contribution will go toward buying the building for about $850,000 and the remainder will go to support parking lot and HVAC repairs. Local citizens have pledged about $100,000.

When people ask why Mercy isn’t paying to renovate or to buy the building, Arends said the coalition does not want the health care organization to do so.

“We’ve got to keep control,” he said, noting that owning the building will help the community protect its health care needs for the future.

Mercy is expected to pay $2 million in expenses, he said.

Arends said the health care coalition has filed to become a 501(c)3 organization, and will be a tax-exempt organization with the ability to own property. Arends said the approval has passed in Minnesota and is pending with the Internal Revenue Service.

With Schlader and Mock looking on, Arends said he has heard from many in the community that the new clinic will not replace services moved with Mayo Clinic Health System’s transition of inpatient services to Austin.

“We can’t replace those services until we get those first five steps,” he said, noting there are goals in the future to replace those services.

He said MercyOne is looking at Albert Lea as an area for growth.