Healthcare: Mercy Medical to ‘ring the beltway’ with clinics
by Emily Mullin for Baltimore Business Journal
Mercy Medical Center is expanding in an unconventional way as it braces for health care reform; it’s taking over a grocery store.
As demand for health care services increases — especially in primary care — Mercy, like other hospitals, is rethinking how it does business. The Baltimore hospital is adding new family medicine offices, called Lutherville Personal Physicians, to a shopping center at York and Ridgely Roads to accommodate more patients.
The new space, a 40,000-square-foot former Giant Food store, will be converted into a medical facility that will house exam rooms, lab services, diagnostic X-ray testing and a Dexa scan, a process for measuring bone density. The building will have room for 15 primary care providers, including eight or nine primary care physicians, and will be equipped to serve 120,000 patients annually. Mercy has a similar medical center in Overlea, a renovated 30,000-square-foot supermarket, that sees 100,000 patients yearly.
While this center is scheduled to open by April, Mercy also plans to launch five more of these community-based medical centers during the next five years.
“Our goal is to ultimately ring the Baltimore beltway,” said Thomas Mullen, president of Mercy Health Services.
Baltimore-based Whiting-Turner Contracting Co., was selected as the general contractor for the project. Mercy officials did not release the cost of the project.
Dr. George Lowe, medical director for the project, said the location of the new building was based off a need for primary care services in Baltimore County. “We go where we can organize a critical mass of primary care services,” Lowe said.
The expansion is also part of Mercy’s effort to become a patient-centered medical home, a model that focuses on the patient and emphasizes quality of care rather than volume of patients.
The idea of a patient-centered medical home is starting to catch on across the state, but few medical systems have taken decisive steps to restructure themselves in this way. Even fewer hospitals — and none in the Baltimore region — have taken over such large commercial spaces.
All of Mercy’s specialty care doctors will also rotate through the center, making it easier for patients to see a specialist.
Even though Mercy has been expanding for a few decades — with the addition of community medical centers in Overlea and Reisterstown — the new building is very much a side effect of health care reform.
“As more patients get insurance, they’re going to need access to primary care,” said Gary Michael, senior vice president for marketing at Mercy.
Other hospitals in the region have expanded to commercial spaces recently but didn’t use the same model as Mercy.
