Marietta health system opening women, children's hospital thanks to $30 million in state budget

At a time when many Ohio maternity wards are closing, one southeast Ohio health system has been making strides to open a new one, thanks in part to $30 million in state funding.

Memorial Health System, headquartered in Marietta, Ohio, will soon build southeast Ohio’s only women and children’s hospital, thanks to $30 million allocated to the project in the state budget, signed by Gov. Mike DeWine on July 5.

The new hospital will be on the system’s Belpre Medical Campus, along with a new Pediatric Emergency Department that was recently built there, and which will open by the end of the year.

The state investment is unprecedented and will go toward the construction of the 180,000-square-foot women and children’s hospital and neighboring medical building, which will be operated in partnership with the Akron Children’s Hospital.

Though Akron is about two hours north of Marietta, the two companies have had a relationship for several years, in part because Memorial Health worked with the Akron hospital to offer specialty services to its own employees, and several of its providers trained at the Akron site before coming to Memorial.

Construction is slated to begin in the spring and will take 18 months to two years, said Scott Cantley, president and CEO of Memorial Health System, a nonprofit regional health system led by a volunteer board of community members.

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There will be an expected 1,600 births there, about double what the existing Memorial Health obstetrics unit has done in the past couple of years, Cantley said. It will also offer closer proximity for infants who need intensive care and access to specialty providers, such as those in pediatric and infant neurology and endocrinology.

Where will the new hospital be?

Belpre, located along the state’s border with West Virginia, was uniquely positioned for the new hospital, as people can come from an 11-county area, Cantley said. There are about 350,000 people living in the region, including counties in neighboring West Virginia, he said.

That area includes neighboring Noble and Monroe counties, which the March of Dimes defines as maternity care deserts, or areas where access to maternity health care services is limited or absent.

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In Ohio, Memorial Health System primarily services Washington, Noble, Monroe, Athens and Meigs counties, Cantley said. It has two hospitals in Ohio and one in West Virginia.

Southeastern Ohio has a long history of a lack of specialized pediatric and maternity care, causing patients to travel upwards of 30 miles away to access care. Of the 13 maternity care deserts identified by the March of Dimes in Ohio, seven are in southeastern Ohio.

For example, in 2021, about 40% of neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) infants needing comprehensive care had to be cared for at facilities outside of the service area, according to Memorial Health System.

Doing things differently

When it comes to providing health care in rural areas, you have to do things a little differently, Cantley said.

So, three years ago, Memorial Health System decided it wanted to prevent the area from becoming a maternity care desert and began to look for the right partners to help bring the best care to children and mothers. It found Akron Children's Hospital, but also reached out to area obstetricians to see if there was enough of a demand to sustain a women and children's hospital.

It took a lot of planning and thought to make it so the hospital would be financially sustainable, especially with many children's health services paid for by Medicaid, which pays providers at a lower rate than private insurance.

"We've demonstrated what's possible when we all pull together," Cantley said. "This region's really hungry for high-quality, world class health care."

A 'transformational' investment by the state

Residents of southeast Ohio are used to taking their children to emergency departments when necessary, not to specialized children’s hospitals like Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus or Akron Children's Hospital, Cantley said.

So much so that, when Cantley started telling people of the pediatric ER and women and children’s hospital Memorial Health System was planning to open, many people said they’d never even thought of that.

For rural Ohioans, this announcement and investment by the state is “transformational,” said Jay Hottinger, a former state representative and senator, who is now executive vice president of Sunday Creek Horizons, a consulting firm focused on rural and Appalachia Ohio that works with Memorial Health System.

“There’s a lot of people that share in the successes,” Hottinger said.

When it comes to getting buy-in from DeWine and state lawmakers to add the expenditure into the state’s budget, Ohio Rep. Jay Edwards (R-Nelsonville) had a "pivotal" role.

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"I am proud of the budget we built over the past few months, which lays a firm foundation for the future of our state through the expansion of access to care for all Ohioans," Edwards said in a statement. "Belpre Medical Campus will be an indispensable resource to the 94th House District and this funding is well-deserved.”

Many community partners also contributed to the building of the hospital, a $125 million project, including: Peoples Bank, Hall Financial Advisors and the Dave and Arlene Archer Family.

When the hospital is built, families will hopefully be 30 minutes from quality care, compared to two hours.

"The rural parts of the state are full of wonderful people that have long been tolerant of missing some of the key pieces that are almost taken for granted in the urban parts of our state," Cantley said. "With these kinds of investments, maybe we can see more economic growth, and we can attract businesses and we can retain our young folks."

dking@dispatch.com

@DanaeKing

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: $30 million in Ohio's budget will go to new hospital in southeast Ohio