‘ER hospital’ mapped for metro
Atlanta
Business Chronicle - by
Urvaksh Karkaria Staff Writer
Joann Vitelli
Joint venture:
Larry Gold, left, CEO,
and Wayne Currie, chairman of Stone Mountain Hospital. |
A
$60 million medical campus being mapped out for
Stone Mountain could include a first in the
Southeast — a freestanding, acute care hospital
focused on emergency medicine. Plans for the campus call for a 50,000-square-foot hospital, an assisted-living center and three medical office buildings that would house specialty practices, including gastroenterology, neurology and cardiology. The hospital, a joint venture between Stone Mountain Hospital Inc. and Arizona-based Gilbert Hospital, would help address the emergency room crisis in Georgia by trimming wait-times and alleviating ER overcrowding, CEO Larry Gold said. As the uninsured population surges, patients often use hospital emergency rooms as their primary care provider. That’s because, hospitals, by law, must stabilize patients in the ER, regardless of their ability to pay. Swamped with many non-emergency cases, ERs are overcrowded, leading to long patient wait-times. |