CEO Explains MDI Hospital's Expansion Is About More Than Buildings
Hospital Is 80% Into Its Fundraising Goal on Multi-million Project
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Side Street Cafe’s New Year’s Eve Party.
BAR HARBOR— Every year, MDI Hospital CEO Chrissi Maguire told those gathered at the Jesup Memorial Library on Thursday, the hospital has given $49 million dollars in uncompensated and free care.
The comment came during the hospital’s community forum about a campus planning and facility update. The construction on a new main entrance and emergency room renovation is expected to begin in 2025, but throughout the discussion Maguire emphasized that the hospital is more about its expanding buildings. It’s also about taking care of the people in the community.
To do that, she stressed, the hospital needs to update its systems and facility. To do that, she said, the hospital needs to expand.
“The hospital is 129 years young next month,” Maguire said and added that the independent organization is grateful to be the island’s health care system.
“Our core values are already centered around community and compassion,” she said, and another value is about improvement. Part of that improvement comes in caring for the community and its visitors in a better facility.
There are 13 health centers and specialty centers across the island and beyond though the hospital itself is critical access and is only allowed 25 beds.
The critical access hospital designation comes from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) after Congress created the designation in the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 (Public Law 105-33). That happened after more than 400 rural hospitals closed in the 1980s and early 1990s.
“The CAH designation is designed to reduce the financial vulnerability of rural hospitals and improve access to healthcare by keeping essential services in rural communities,” according to the Rural Health Information Hub.
The hospital announced the expansion project in 2021. The Maine Department of Health of Human Services approved the project via a certificate of need, November 21.
“We just received our certificate of need approval,” she said. The hospital applied in August. It has been working with the town on permits.
“There was a huge initiative to get traffic off Wayman and Hancock,” Maguire said of the initial thoughts, but now, the town wants things to not come back on Main Street.
The project is dependent on two things: the discontinuing of Stanwood Place, a short road off Main Street that ends on the hospital’s campus. That is in process and has to be approved by the town. The hospital is also going through a Site Location of Development Act (SLODA)permitting process. This is with the DEP, EPA, and the Historical Society. A lot of larger organizations review the plan. That takes three to four months.
“A SLODA ensures environmental conditions compliance and is managed by the DEP,” said Derek Veilleux, senior principal, director of health and wellness practice at SMRT Architects and Engineers.
The goal is to have shovels in the ground in the second quarter of 2025.
This week, the hospital also announced it had acquired Acadia Family Center. Acadia Family Center is gifting its assets to MDI Hospital. “We are deeply committed,” Maguire said, to taking care of those with behavioral health needs.
“As you all have heard we’re in a crisis—a behavioral health crisis. Emergency departments in Maine are where kids and adults are parked for months and months and months,” she said.
In Skowhegan there was a thirteen year old girl stuck in a hospital for 304 days while she waited for a placement. She had long-term developmental, mental and physical needs. She spent those months in an exam room waiting for care that federal law says she is entitled to. Cases like hers were part of why the federal government sued Maine.
Part of the Mount Desert Island Hospital’s new emergency department will have a more calming aspect for behavioral health patients like that Skowhegan girl, Maguire said. That’s because kids with long-term mental, developmental, and physical needs are here, too.
“We have an epidemic with children,” she said who are waking up and feeling as if there is no reason to live. The hospital, she said, voice breaking a bit during the subject, is committed to expanding ways that it can help those children.
Maguire also spoke to the uncertainty that the community felt when Northern Light announced it was closing the medical practice in Southwest Harbor in August. The system said this was due to high expenses and staffing issues.
“They were in grief,” Maguire said of people served by the clinic that had been there since the 1960s. “They were losing something. That was their community asset.” Maguire said. If Northern Light could close this, she said, they wondered if MDI Hospital might close things too.
“Nothing is going to happen at MDI Hospital,” she said. The hospital is there to take care of people, she said, and it will continue to be.
At a community presentation last month, Northern Light Health President and CEO of Northern Light Health Tim Dentry said. “We recognize that the future of healthcare is not just about innovation and technology; it’s also about our relationships with people like you.”
“You’ll see there’s a lot of construction going on,” said Maguire about the hospital’s Bar Harbor campus, but she stressed that the street work on Main Street that’s been occurring this year is the town of Bar Harbor’s work, not the hospital’s.
“Nothing grows in the comfort zone,” she said, quoting a fitness influencer, but she hopes for positive changes for the community for the outside space as well, envisioning people gathered on the hospital’s new grassy areas along Main Street for the Fourth of July parade. “Any place we could add green space, we’re doing that.”
KOGOD CENTER FOR MEDICAL EDUCATION
One part of the hospital’s expansion in downtown Bar Harbor is the Kogod Center for Medical Education, which was completed this year. The building was funded by a $3 million donor. The building gives temporary homes to eight medical students and residents at a time. Those students learn at the hospital and experience rural health care in all its positives and negatives while on Mount Desert Island.
They have a waiting list of health care providers waiting to cycle through the program, Maguire said.
“This project is the corner stone of what the campus is going to look like,” Maguire said.
The Kogod building faces south rather than toward Main Street, she said, because of the hospital’s commitment to climate resiliency. It’s a passive solar, carbon neutral housing unit that houses eight medical students.
CENTRAL UTILITY PROJECT
The hospital was initially built in 1897, opening its doors in 1898. Wings were added in 1937, 1962, and 1969.
“She’s got good bones. She’s got great bones,” Maguire said, “but she does need a face lift.”
The mechanical systems were from the 1960s and needed updating, which is part of the central utility project. Now there are new boilers that can use multiple fuel sources, new HVAC systems, and the changes are meant to reduce the hospital’s reliance on fossil fuel.
This part of the expansion will be done in the beginning of 2025.
CAMPUS EXPANSION-MAIN ENTRANCE, EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT, SURGICAL SUITE
Maguire explained to those gathered in person at the library and via Zoom that there are three remaining big pieces of the expansion: a new main entrance, a new emergency room entrance with an ambulance bay and almost tripling that department’s size, and an updated surgical suite.
The new main entrance is partially because people are often confused about how to enter the hospital. The Wayman Lane entrance used to be the main entrance, but everyone now is funneled through the emergency room entrance.
To expand, the hospital has been strategically purchasing buildings around it for the last 13 years.
“There was not going to be enough land to build a new hospital,” on its current campus, Maguire said and the only land they could find had a covenant that said a hospital could not be built on it. Despite the rural nature of the hospital, the need has expanded as the tourism has, she said.
“Our busiest day was the same day as the busiest day in the park this year,” Maguire said of October 13, a day that Acadia National Park recorded record breaking attendance. The hospital administration and board understood that they had to expand the emergency department and to renovate the surgical suite to serve people injured and ill on the island and in the park.
They have offered current buildings on the site to the Island Housing Trust. “I would much rather not put a big excavator through a building,” that could be reused somewhere else, she said.
Site work will have to be done to allow the expansion of the split-level hospital. In some places that will require digging 5.5 feet. In the design, she said, they’ve tried to find design elements that seemed to stay true to the Mount Desert Island character as well as keeping the historical character of red bricks.
A traffic study will be shared later this week, Maguire said.
“A couple of buildings are going to have to come down,” she told attendees.
One of those buildings is the Family Health Center across from Cooper Gilmore. It currently houses the hospital’s IT department. During construction, there will be a direct entrance into the hospital via Main Street.
The emergency room entrance will face Wayman Lane, and it will require digging down approximately five feet. People on Main Street will be able to see that entrance. Currently, that sightline is blocked
The emergency department will almost triple in size.
“We’ve been moving people around like a chess board,” Maguire said to find space to put people and take care of them.
FUNDING
Maguire said that the hospital has done everything it can to minimize debt related to the project. The majority of the funding is $42 million in construction, and the hospital is raising a total $55 million so that it doesn’t cannibalize unrestricted giving during this construction.
The hospital is 80% into its fundraising achievement. Senators Susan Collins and Angus King have also secured $5 million in federal funds.
Maguire said the hospital plans to go public with the campaign next summer at which point the the hospital will hopefully be at 90% of the total funding.
“We’re so excited with the support we’ve been receiving,” she said.
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