By Healthcare Facilities Today

Hastings, Mich.-based Pennock Health Services is designing its new $70 million hospital to reflect how medicine is practiced today, according to an article on the MiBiz website.

“What we want to do is create value in a different way, and that involves taking cost, quality and patient experience to a different level,” said President Sheryl Lewis Blake in the article.  “We think healthcare reform gives us a clean slate to do it.”

Like many independent community hospitals that are affiliating with larger health systems in an era of reform, Pennock Health is examining the future, the article said. The board of trustees is examining the affiliation model “so that if the time comes, they are prepared to make what I describe as a very planned and deliberate decision,” Lewis Blake said.

A new campus will better position the health system for the future, whether Pennock stays independent or seeks a partner, she said.

The decision by Pennock trustees to proceed with the 49-bed hospital and physician office building came seven years after they first considered the move. Citing the economic instability and uncertainty from coming healthcare reform, directors decided to put a new hospital on hold and re-evaluate in 2013.

Read the article.