The doctors will see you now.
Columbia County's long-awaited first hospital opened Wednesday near Grovetown, and didn't wait long for its first three scheduled patients to receive two shoulder replacements and a tonsillectomy.
At the new 100-bed, $380 million Wellstar Columbia County Medical Center, there's room for more.
That's good news for neighboring Augusta hospitals, including Wellstar MCG Health Medical Center, affiliated with the Medical College of Georgia. Sub-critical Wellstar MCG patients who live in Columbia County can consent to be transferred to the new hospital closer to home.
"We know that the hospitals downtown, not only MCG but Piedmont and
Doctors, are constantly at capacity," said Nelson So, Wellstar CCMC's chief operating officer. "So having Columbia County come onboard will help decompress those facilities and potentially make capacity available for them to see other, sicker patients if we take on the less acute patients here."
Wellstar CCMC's first emergency room patient arrived Wednesday just two minutes after the facility's 8 a.m. opening. The 17-bed ER is expected to grow to 40 beds after the hospital recently was granted permission to expand by the Georgia Department of Community Health, according to So.
Construction crews still on the hospital campus are working on that expansion and more. A 14-chair infusion center is being completed to offer onsite chemotherapy and other intravenous treatments, So said. An adjacent medical office building is scheduled to open this November. The hospital's fourth floor is expected to be built out in Fiscal Year 2028.
The path "to get completely open is probably a two-year journey," he said.
Wellstar CCMC is wired with digital technology designed to render care more efficiently. Touch-screen smart boards have replaced the more familiar dry-erase marker boards in patients' rooms that inform families and care teams about treatment plans.
"It's amazing," said Amanda Dyer, the hospital's perianesthetic nursing supervisor. "If you ask any nurse about their white boards they immediately have a gut reaction of just 'ugh.' Now we have these beautiful boards that take all the information from the patient's personal record."
Working in a new hospital means staffers don't inherit some of the hidebound operational challenges faced by older hospitals, according to So.
"We're bringing staff in from all different places. They've all come from different backgrounds, different facilities," he said. "Kind of the beauty of it is, they get to flush out the bad and bring in the good. We've had staff come from all over with their great ideas of what they can infuse, best practices that we want to adopt here, and we've gotten to pull that altogether to hopefully optimize what we can provide to the community."
This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: Columbia County's first hospital brings medical care closer to home
