Letting the light in for medical care at Cayuga Park
The ongoing work at Cayuga Park is hard to miss for Ithacans, with the lot seated just off Route 13, at the end of 3rd Street on the Cayuga lake waterfront and the Cayuga Health medical location there growing to five-stories since breaking ground in July 2021.
The new location - in development by Rochester-based developer DiMarco Constructors - will offer walk-in immediate care, Medicaid friendly primary care, specialty services, women’s health, on site imaging and a lab patient service center.
Cayuga Health expects the building to begin offering services this fall, with each of its floors dedicated to a respective health service, including immediate care, which Jeffrey Penoyer, chief operating officer of Cayuga Medical Associates, said Thursday, closely resemble the services that primary care physicians can offer.
“It’s primary care-like services, so perhaps you can’t get your primary care provider and you’re looking for more immediate access, you would come to immediate care for those services,” he said. “If you have laceration, maybe broke an arm or leg, and you need to get to a doctor before you can get a referral, that’s the type of patient I expect we’ll be seeing.”
“Immediate care cannot always be immediate depending on the time of day and how busy it is, but it’s what we try to achieve,” Penoyer said. “Patients can walk in from any location in the community whether you’re a patient of Cayuga Health or not and get a proper array of lab tests.”
The look of it all
The medical complex sports a modern look, with glass shedding natural light in much of the space designated for nurses, lab technicians and other medical office staff.
In planning the facility, Cayuga Health focused on promoting healthy habits not just for the patients, but for staff as well, Penoyer said.
Artistically painted walls dot the buildings walls with swirls of red and blue cutting through the typical drab white of most health care facilities, including the walls of a black light pediatric room that were painted to depict monarch butterflies and flowers by Ithaca artist Mary Beth Ihnken, who also painted the Trader Joe's in Ithaca’s downtown.
The facility includes restrooms complete with showers and lactation rooms for nursing mothers and several break rooms for staff.
“One of the nice things about this space is that it doesn’t feel like a traditional breakroom,” Penoyer said, walking behind a tall white table. “With the raised tables, it will be a nice space for our employees to gather.”
Expanding with the community
Cayuga Health officials say that they’re continuing efforts to make accessing its services easier, along with enhancing collaborations between different health service departments and offering the Immediate Care Services, alongside primary care, women's health, chemotherapy, and lab testing services.
“We operate about eight hours a day, seven days a week, and were looking to expand up to 12 hours a day,” Penoyer said. “Immediate care is one of our busiest services we have, so we have been slowly upping staffing to meet the community’s needs, but we will be expanding staffing as we expand hours.”
He said that physicians in the networks State Street Family Medicine facility will be moved to Cayuga Park once development is finished.
"Nationally, recruiting primary care providers and sustaining primary care services in a community is really challenging," Penoyer said.
He said that Cayuga Health’s Internal Medicine Residency program is working with 30 physicians training to be doctors.
“We hope that we can recruit those folks to stay in our communities,” he said. “We have five that will be joining us this fall and we’ll start to accept new patients.”
Penoyer said that the facility is scheduled to open this fall.
Two mixed-use buildings will soon begin construction on the same lot, with their own parking for market rate apartments and retail establishments.
This article originally appeared on Ithaca Journal: Cayuga park to begin immediate care services this fall
