MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The West Virginia University Health System Board of Directors has approved a plan to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into healthcare facilities in West Virginia and the surrounding region.
WVU Medicine President and CEO Albert Wright said they want to focus on and improve the level of and access to care across their system. The improvements are planned for several sites in West Virginia, Maryland and Ohio.
“We’re really trying to build breadth and depth of clinical services and clinical access around the state,” Wright said Thursday during an appearance on MetroNews “Talkline.” “This is the third year in a row we’ve batched clinical investments across the state.”
The largest investment will be the $135 million new patient tower at the Camden Clark Hospital in Parkersburg. The project increases inpatient bed capacity from 260 to 300 and begins the transitions to all private rooms. Four additional surgical suites will be added along with specific floors for women and children. The new facility will also include private labor, delivery, recovery, and postpartum rooms and the addition of 450 new parking spaces.
“It’s a hospital with great history, but some of the hospital floors there are truly what we would have considered wards back in the day,” Wright said.
Wright noted the many changes in the health care delivery system in the last decade for the northern panhandle. Due to the changes, they’ll build a $56 million small hospital in St. Clairsville, Ohio that will be a branch of the Wheeling Hospital that is expected to open next year.
“We just made the decision to consolidate a lot of our outpatient offices on the Ohio side,” Wright said. “We’ll build a small community hospital where we’ll have all of our clinical services—imaging—and we’ll have a great emergency department and a small inpatient unit.”
In Fairmont, WVU Medicine has already invested 120 million since the closure of the old Fairmont Medical Center in 2020. The plan includes a $68 million investment to completely demolish the 1939 building and replace it with a new up-to-date structure.
“Phase III involves taking that building down and replacing it with a three-story building that will house several different things but most importantly expanding our ambulatory care presence in the Fairmont community,” Michael Grace, president and CEO of WVU Hospitals and COO of the WVU Health System, said on WAJR’s “Talk of the Town.”
Cancer treatment options are going to be added at the Garrett Regional Medical Center in Oakland, Maryland, and in Weirton. The Weirton Medical Center will be the site of a new $20.1 million Cancer Center, and in Oakland they plan to build a $15 million three-story Radiation Oncology Center.
“We’ll add radiation oncology in Weirton Medical Center,” Grace said. “Another example will be the addition of radiation oncology also to Garrett Regional Medical Center in Maryland.”
Other projects include a $2.5 million orthopedic suite at the Potomac Valley Hospital, a new medical office building at the Princeton Community Hospital, and nearly $13 million at Thomas Hospitals in South Charleston for a surgical intensive care unit and renovations to support nuclear medicine.
The projects will be financed with a combination of cash, credit and possibly bonds,” Grace said.