BATH

A year since Mid Coast Medical Group broke ground for a new facility in Topsham, it celebrated the start of another construction project Thursday that will conclude in the spring with a two-story, 20,000-square-foot medical building in the middle of downtown Bath.

City officials, the developer, architects, engineers, bank lenders and other stakeholders joined Mid Coast leaders Thursday for the brief groundbreaking ceremony at the site at 108 Centre St. The former building on the site was demolished and the former tenant, Habitat for Humanity/7 Rivers Maine offices and its ReStore, relocated to a larger space in Topsham.

Mid Coast Medical Group currently has an office located in the Midcoast Center for Higher Education — the former Bath hospital — and plans to move that operation into the new building, currently on schedule to open in May of 2015, according to developer J. Hilary Rocket of JHR Development. Soon steel will go up, he said during the ceremony.

The new facility will consist of eight physicians, one physician assistant, 26 support staff members and a fulltime licensed clinical social worker.

Lois Skillings, president and CEO of Mid Coast Health Services, said wherever she goes she’s heard uniform enthusiasm for the project — palpable on the community, “whether I’m at Bath Rotary or the Autumnfest or shopping — it doesn’t matter. It’s community building, and that’s really our mission to help with the community. So being in the heart of the community helps us achieve that.”

The Bath building will be home to nine providers, “and we’re building enough room to grow,” Skillings said. The team worked together on the design around the new patient-centered medical home model, which allows for more of a team approach to primary care, Skillings said.

“So instead of seeing one patient at a time — we still do that for acute needs — we’re also working with the patients and their families around how to keep them healthy,” she said, “and how to achieve their health goals when they’re not coming in to see their doctor, their nurse practitioner or their physician assistant.”

Being in the heart of the community makes it easy for people to find and get to Mid Coast to have their everyday health care needs met.

“Very few people actually need hospital care; most health care happens at the primary care office,” Skillings said. “That is the heart and hub — the foundation if you will — of health care, so having access to that in the community, it really makes a big difference.”

The models in downtown Brunswick and in Topsham are successful, according to Skillings. The new facility in Topsham has exceeded expectations and already, opened less than six months, the site is expanding as planned. That demonstrates a need, Skillings said, and “I think people really like accessing that care locally in their community.”

Access to that primary care within the community makes sense, but “consolidating expensive hospital infrastructure in a regional way also makes sense,” because so few people do need hospital care.

While Mid Coast’s quality scores are consistently high — Joint Commission Accredited and a Magnet facility by the American Nurses Credentialing Center — when compared to other hospitals and health care organizations, “our cost is 25 percent below the statewide average and it has been consistently … and it’s because of our deep commitment to the economy of this region.” Local businesses rely on having affordable heath care, “and even then, it’s challenging. So keeping our costs low has been a longterm ethic of ours.”

The practice has always been in Bath where many of the patients live, said Dr. Scott Mills, the vice president of Medical Administration and Chief Medical Office at Mid Coast Hospital. This will be one of the larger of the organization’s 19 practices, he said.

In terms of how practices work now, it’s not just an exam room and doctor anymore; it’s also all the other players, Mills said. For example, there is a behavior health specialist with space in the clinic now to talk to about and work with people on life issues.

“We all believe that primary care is the foundation of everybody’s care,” he said. “They really need to have a provider that they can sit down and talk to about their basic and chronic care needs.”

It’s also communicating and interacting with patients when they’re home.

“We want this to be patient friendly,” Mills said, so patients can come easily for their labs, and care on a regular basis. “For our staff, they’ll be able to get lunch, pick up stuff at Renys or whatever it is on the way home, so it’s really convenient for them. It’s awesome.”

dmoore@timesrecord.com