RIVERTON—The Riverton Medical District met its deadline, if by a hair’s breadth.
The district aimed to begin construction of its ambitious community-owned hospital in 2024. That goal became reality midway through December when heavy equipment operators readied pits for the foundation on a property north of town.
It represents a major step forward in what’s been an enormous feasibility, fundraising and planning effort to build a community-owned hospital.
After years of work and several setbacks, the ground breaking is tangible evidence of progress, said Corte McGuffey, chair of the Riverton Medical District Board. The board had to sprint and scramble to line up all the pieces necessary to reach this point, he said on a recent cloudy day while standing amid ground flags and construction equipment.
Community feedback “has been wonderful. Everybody is super excited,” he said. “Footings and foundation will be next.”
If all goes to plan, the end result will be a two-story, 71,000-square-foot hospital focused on providing essential medical services to the town of 11,000 residents and its surrounding communities. Design plans call for 13 in-patient beds, labor and delivery services, intensive care, two surgical suites and a trauma bay.
The new hospital will join the town’s existing hospital, SageWest Health Care, which sits near the high school on the east side of town. Though it’s unusual for a rural town to have two hospitals, the new facility actually spawned from local displeasure at consolidation and loss of services under SageWest.
The effort to create the new facility touches on struggles across much of rural America between small towns and for-profit health care. What’s unique here is the citizens’ decision to take matters into their own hands and actually execute such a complicated and hefty endeavor.
“This hospital represents our community’s resilience and determination to bring back local health care,” McGuffey said.
The project isn’t there yet. Even after the building is constructed, the board still needs to staff the facility, and recruiting doctors to rural practices is notoriously difficult. For now, however, board members and supporters are celebrating how far they’ve come just to disturb this patch of dirt.
Building their own
Hospitals in Riverton and neighboring Lander were historically separate entities. They merged in 2014 to form a single system called SageWest Health Care. SageWest was a subsidiary of the Tennessee-based rural hospital chain LifePoint Health. In 2016, Lifepoint consolidated the Lander and Riverton campuses. That transition included closing Riverton’s labor and delivery unit, and cutting back on some surgeries there.
In late 2021, LifePoint merged with Kindred Health under an acquisition by the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. Today, the SageWest hospitals in both Lander and Riverton are part of Scion Health, a network of nearly 80 hospitals across 25 states with headquarters in Kentucky.
Patient-safety concerns spurred the decision to consolidate Fremont County services, SageWest CEO John Whiteside told WyoFile in 2023. “In order to provide the best, safest care for the patients, they consolidated.”
Critics, however, saw cost-cutting at the expense of community needs. And in Riverton, the end of services like delivering babies was enough to propel some to action.
The Riverton Medical District started with a group of citizens publicly criticizing SageWest in letters calling for change. The hospital was no longer meeting basic standards of care, they argued. The group ultimately consolidated around an ambitious goal: building a community-owned hospital to provide that care
Adequate health care is crucial to attracting young families, retirees and businesses, and it has trickle-down effects that benefit a town’s economy, board members said. In that way, they said, the effort is linked to the very viability of Riverton.
Over the course of about five years, the group secured a raft of grants, financial supports and donations to make the project work. That included a $37.1 million USDA Rural Development loan, $15 million in federal grant funding facilitated by the state and the donation of a four-acre parcel of land from the Eastern Shoshone Tribe to build on.
The district is partnering with the Billings Clinic and plans to be an affiliate of the larger health care company. The association with the Montana-based system will offer access to numerous key resources and, district members hope, help recruit quality talent.
Along with delivery and intensive care services, the vision is to have a helicopter pad, outpatient clinic and services like radiology, laboratory and pharmacy. Specialty care services will include trauma, orthopedics and 24/7 surgery availability.
The facility, which will combine hospital and clinic services, is scheduled for completion in late 2026 and will employ an estimated staff of 140, according to the Riverton Medical District.
Another roughly 90 jobs will be created during construction. The district has selected BHI out of Vernal, Utah, as its general contractor.
Hurdles
The effort has not been without bumps, delays and trips back to the drawing board. The group’s first attempt, last spring, at bidding for a construction contractor failed to solicit an affordable and workable bid. A second attempt secured a general contractor, but the district members spent the summer finding ways to save on construction — mostly by making cosmetic changes to the building, McGuffey said. That triggered a new appraisal.
Meeting the Oct. 31 deadline to secure roughly $15 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds allocated by the state was another scramble, he said. The district had to be under contract by that date. “It was a sprint,” McGuffey said. “But we got it all in.”
When construction commenced on Dec. 12, it did so within the stated timeline of 2024 — albeit with just days to go.
Critics of the hospital project, including SageWest’s former CEO, have called the effort unnecessary, saying the Fremont County community is already well-served by its two existing hospitals.
Community supporters believe otherwise. The project, they say, has drawn on the strength of the broader Riverton community to see this unlikely effort to this point. “Achieving this milestone is a testament to the dedication of our neighbors and supporters,” McGuffey said.
We have some great dedicated professionals in our present medical community The trouble is they seem stifled by the sage west domination.
Patient complaints go unanswered and state control is totally worthless. Find the good ones and recruit the best. If they were listened to and changes made the good professional will appreciate it, the rest will find employment at sage west.
ARPA, $15 million? Surprised I am that any of that Biden $$$ was found useful in Frank Eathorne’s territory? Happy for the residents who will receive a bit better healthcare in general, but depending on supreme court’s decisions, probably not obstetric care. Oh well, “Abstinence makes the heart grow cold.”
Way to go! I am very pleased to see Dr Ridgeway sitting there, we have a great start in developing the kind of health care we enjoyed before it was decided to sell our health care to some outside folks.