Nearly 80 patients moved into new Ascension St. Vincent Women and Infants Hospital
The new 268,000-square-foot hospital is on the south side of Ascension St. Vincent’s 86th Street campus and is connected to the Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital.
The new 268,000-square-foot hospital is on the south side of Ascension St. Vincent’s 86th Street campus and is connected to the Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital.
But two years after the groundbreaking for an Ascension St. Vincent facility in West Lafayette, the planned $25 million development has little to show for itself. The 7-acre site sits empty, with no indication that anything is coming soon.
In the past five years, the nation’s largest Catholic health system has unloaded more than a dozen hospitals across the country, from New York to Alabama, as it restructures amid a growing tide of red ink.
Former Indianapolis Colts Quarterback Peyton Manning on Thursday announced the Care for Tomorrow campaign has received nearly $24 million in donor funding since its launch a year ago.
The shutdowns mark the latest of several waves of Ascension facility closures in Indiana in the last year.
Ascension St. Vincent closed the facility just five years after opening it as the first in a new model of tiny hospitals around central Indiana.
Ascension’s decision to require vaccinations follows similar mandates by all three other major health systems here.
Ascension Technologies, the IT subsidiary of St. Louis-based Ascension, is outsourcing the jobs to overseas companies.
The heavy investment in the campus—including a new women’s hospital and a brain and spine center—is the latest indication that Ascension St. Vincent is committed to the location, a major anchor along the busy West 86th Street corridor.
Three years after Indiana passed a law allowing doctors to prescribe drugs for patients without an in-person visit—using a computer, smartphone, video camera and similar technology—some health systems around the state are reporting higher use of virtual visits. St. Vincent, for example, sees hundreds of patients a month remotely for ailments ranging from minor rashes and sprains to follow-up visits for strokes.
The hospital system’s 45-year-old campus will likely need hundreds of millions of dollars in upgrades in coming years to keep it competitive long term.
The Indianapolis-based health system said the move will give patients more treatment options. It has opened five tiny hospitals in the last two years, and plans to open three more later this year.
Just 20 months ago, Tandem Hospital Partners had set up a joint venture with St. Vincent to develop a series of tiny hospitals. Today, the results are far different from what either company probably imagined.
For hospitals, maternity care builds relationships with young families that often last for decades. About 40 percent of women experience their first encounter with hospitals for reproductive services.
The Indianapolis health system said it has not yet decided how to develop the site, but wants to keep its options open. It dropped plans four months ago to rezone the land after neighbors objected.
The lawsuit by a former medical director alleges St. Vincent engaged in a practice of “pushing out employees over the age of 40 and hiring substantially younger employees.”
St. Vincent, one of the oldest and most familiar names in Indiana’s hospital landscape, is about to undergo the most sweeping rebranding in its history.
The Indianapolis-based health system is under pressure from parent Ascension to cut costs, and has signaled in recent months that it plans to transform its delivery system.
The Indianapolis-based health system said it will continue to study possibilities for the land after neighbors objected to plans calling for nine buildings and four parking garages that carried an estimated price tag of $1 billion.
St. Vincent Health has agreed to pay $15,000 to a former employee and increase worker training under a settlement with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.