The rapid expansion of the Heber Valley community has not gone unnoticed by Intermountain Health, and the nonprofit health system is working to expand its care opportunities in the area to better help locals in need of medical care, particularly those in need of commonly sought-after specialists.
According to Heber Valley Hospital President Si Hutt, the building’s main campus received a $43 million investment that was spent on a five-year project ending in 2020.
That initiative, Hutt said, “touched really everything in the hospital, upgraded and expanded in the areas we needed to.
“We added the InstaCare at that time, and then we doubled the size of our Heber Valley Clinic. That is intended for primary care. So family practice, internal medicine, pediatrics and OB-GYN are all over there.”
In a later phase of that project, the hospital recently finished expanding its specialty clinic. Last month, the project was complete, leaving the clinic three times larger than it had been prior to the initiative.
“We’ve had some specialists who were in our old specialty clinic, which was a third of the size but in the same space,” Hutt said.
The doctors, however, only had five exam rooms, which severely limited patients’ access to seeing those specialists like dermatologists, urologists, gastroenterologists and general surgeons.
“If somebody was here on that day, nobody else could be,” Hutt said. “We’ve given them more exam rooms. They have more clinic days that are available.”
More specialists are now operating out of the clinic to serve community members who otherwise would have needed to either wait or travel to see a doctor.
“We’ll start out more part-time, but then that’s going to expand over time as volumes are supported,” Hutt said. “We’ve had a couple of specialties that have actually been in in the primary care clinic, but that’s because they didn’t have any room over here, so now that this is built out, we’re moving them over.”
Growing the specialty services here in Heber City, he said, is the next part of the expansion. In the future, when the population can support them, those services will also grow to include things like endocrinology and neurology.
“Until that point, we are also looking at tele specialties,” Hutt said.
He explained the benefit of the expansion and the continually growing services lies in convenience for patients. For some, that can mean the difference between visiting a doctor and ignoring an ailment or condition.
“It’s just more convenient, and so we do have particularly elderly patients that are just like, ‘Yeah, if it’s here, I’ll do it. If it’s down in Salt Lake, I’m just going to pass,'” Hutt said. “Bringing those closer is much better. And the people have really busy lives.”
He said longtimers in the valley might not recognize everything that is now currently offered close to them.
“Come check it out,” he said. “There are a lot of services here. We’ve really moved to having a lot of different kinds of specialties here. … We’re small enough that we can still really deliver personalized care.”
If you can get it done at home, he said, get it done at home.
