MountainView Hospital to continue emphasis on Medicare patients

MountainView Hospital will continue its emphasis on Medicare patients with the imminent completion of its $70 million new wing.

The second phase of the expansion, scheduled to open either Thursday or July 8 depending on final approvals, will add 19 rooms to its emergency department and 32 primary care rooms.

MountainView houses a range of practices. However, CEO Will Wagnon said the hospital’s emphasis has fallen on cardiac care and chest pain plus stroke treatment, in line with the large senior population in neighborhoods such as Sun City that are near the hospital at 3100 N. Tenaya Way.

In conjunction with the first phase, which opened in January, MountainView’s bed count rises to 322. This includes 42 beds in the emergency room, all of which are contained in private rooms rather than being separated by the curtain partitions that have been a long-time feature of emergency medicine.

By doubling the ER’s size, Wagnon said, the hospital wants to push easy access for its target population.

However, the Affordable Care Act has numerous provisions meant to increase preventive care rather than have people show up in expensive ERs when something goes wrong and they have no place else to go.

Still, Wagnon said, the ER will continue to play an important role in medical care.

“This give people access matching a sense of urgency,” he said. “People in the ER seek immediate care, and it needs to be robust in a time of crisis.”

MountainView staged the work so that the ER beds in the new structure went into operation in January. Then the existing ones were renovated.

The second floor of the new wing, also inaugurated early this year, has 32 primary care beds and 12 for intensive care, all of them in private rooms that are the standard among the newer facilities in Las Vegas.

Originally, the third floor was designated to be left as a shell for an unspecified time. But as MountainView’s patient counts boomed — its 86 percent occupancy rate last year ranked the highest in Clark County and a third more than the 64 percent average, according to state statistics — hospital administrators and owners, the for-profit chain HCA, decided to move ahead.

The remaining work at MountainView, budgeted at about $15 million, will cover the rehabilitation center in an adjoining office building, renovation of the lobby and other interior work in the older sections of the hospital.

The latter will include touches such as new paint and floor tiles to erase any difference in appearance between old and new.

The rehabilitation center, scheduled to open by autumn, will boost MountainView to 340 beds.

Last year, state statistics reported that MountainView had a $10.4 million operating profit on $254.6 million in revenues. About 61 percent of its billings by dollar were sent to Medicare, about 15 percentage points higher than the county average and what MountainView did in 2007.

When the hospital opened in 1996, it staked out a profitable franchise in the growing northwest part of the valley.

That turned to losses by 2010 as a result of the combined effects of the recession, the loss of a major health plan for all of HCA, and the openings of nearby Centennial Hills Hospital and a new wing of Summerlin Medical Center.

The senior-care strategy has helped reverse the losses.

Contact reporter Tim O’Reiley at toreiley@
reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5290.