A mid-Hudson Valley healthcare group is expanding once again. Health Quest plans to renovate a portion of an Ulster County mall to house a number of medical services.
Timmian Massie is senior vice president for Marketing, Public Affairs and Government Relations at Health Quest, a group of nonprofit hospitals and healthcare providers in the Mid-Hudson Valley and northwestern Connecticut.
“We just signed a contract with the owners of the Hudson Valley Mall in the Town to open up an 86,000 square-foot facility that is pretty much going to be a hospital with everything but overnight beds,” Massie says.
John Nelson, also a Health Quest spokesman, adds further details.
“It’s a multispecialty building, so the key is we’re going to bring in urgent care. It’ll house specialists, so everything from primary care to neurology to cardiology. We’re going to plan to have a breast cancer service there. We’ll have infusion, the type of place that you can go to that you don’t…,” Nelson says. “You know when you go to the doctor and then you get the thing where you have to go to the lab to get a test or you have to go get imaging; this is a place that’ll have all off that stuff so you don’t have to go elsewhere to get it.”
The news comes the same month that Health Quest announced it is partnering with Marist College to create The Marist Health Quest School of Medicine, at the Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie. In addition to Vassar Brothers, hospitals under the Health Quest umbrella includes Northern Dutchess and Putnam Hospital Center. Meantime, Massie details the timeline for the new medical center at the Hudson Valley Mall.
“Because this site is very important for our graduate medical education students, since family medicine, graduate medical education students will be working out of this site, we want to have it at least partially open by July of 2019. Other facilities will be opened by the end of 2019,” says Massie. “We’ll also be applying for a certificate of need from the state Health Department to open up an ambulatory surgery center that would open then after that.
Plus, he says:
“We’re able to also bring in new jobs, repurpose an abandoned facility, and it’ll be a great benefit for the people of Ulster and northern Dutchess,” Massie says.
Health Quest has been busy of late, having also invested more than $8 million into a new 15,000-square-foot multispecialty office on Route 299 between Highland and New Paltz, which opened in August. To make way for the new building, Health Quest purchased a 5.6-acre property in 2017, revitalizing a parcel where a vacant building stood. The project in Ulster County took about 10 months to complete.
