The 240-bed hospital in Rolla is more than doubling the size of its emergency department.
The $60 million expansion is expected to open in 2027 with more and bigger rooms, private spaces to treat sexual assault victims and mental health patients as well as labs and diagnostic facilities.
Phelps Health’s investment comes as smaller rural hospitals face financial challenges. Twenty-one hospitals have closed in Missouri over the past decade, many of them in rural areas.
Changes to state and federal rules on Medicare and Medicaid have raised concerns for rural health providers. Rural hospitals often rely upon payments through those programs to stay afloat. It’s all placing more pressure on larger regional hospitals that are still in rural areas to do more.
Phelps Health ended its previous fiscal year in the black, with two-thirds of its patients paying via Medicare or Medicaid. Phelps Health is moving forward with its expansion plans despite uncertainty about those health insurance programs.
Phelps Health CEO Jason Shenefield said federal payments “are always something we're struggling with. It's highlighted right now with what's going on, but I think we're always looking at how to do things better, and more efficiently.”
When Jenece Martin was elected to the hospital's board of trustees in 2022, she said she spent a lot of time asking people about the hospital and received a lot of compliments and concerns.
“Most of those concerns were based on the fact that we just needed more ER space and we needed more space that was specific for certain things that happen in an ER situation,” she said.
The expansion was also informed by what the hospital endured during the coronavirus pandemic. Like many hospitals, Phelps Health was near or at capacity while treating COVID-19 patients, and the age and layout of the facilities made delivering care more difficult.
“As we designed this [new] space, we really looked ahead of if we were to have an infectious outbreak of some kind in the future, that we could provide care in a very safe environment,” said Keri Heavin, Phelps’ chief nursing and operations officer.
The expansion plan includes space for hospital growth, with the two floors above the new emergency department and the current ER space available for new offices, labs or patient care.
