New medical office building opens

NorthCare at St. Francis, an 80,000-square-foot, physician-owned medical office building linked via a skybridge to the new St. Francis Medical Center, opens today, Aug. 4.

Many of the tenants are relocating to the new hospital campus at Woodmen Road and Powers Boulevard from the area surrounding Penrose Community Hospital on North Academy Boulevard. That hospital is closing Aug. 16, the day St. Francis Medical Center opens.

Tenants in the new building include Pikes Peak Urology, Walgreens, Women’s Surgical Center, Davita Dialysis, Mountain View Medical Group Pediatric Specialists and numerous others.

The building was developed by NorthCare LLC, headed by local physician Dr. Kevin Weary and Michael Heritage of The London Real Estate Group. It is 85 percent leased, Heritage said.

Centura's chief medical officer takes new job

Dr. Terry O'Rourke, chief medical officer for Centura Health and formerly a general surgeon in Colorado Springs for 28 years, has accepted a new job.

He will leave Denver-based Centura and on June 2 become executive vice president and chief medical officer at Trinity Health, based in Novi, Mich. Trinity Health is the fourth largest Catholic health care system in the nation with 44,000 employees.

O'Rourke practiced as a general surgeon primarily at Penrose Hospital, which is managed by Centura, a joint Catholic/Adventist venture. As the system-wide CMO for the past three years, O'Rourke improved quality measures and safety at hospitals in the system, founded the Physician Leadership Academy and the Clinical Leadership Council and served as the clinical leader for the organization's new electronic medical and financial records system.

An interim CMO will be named, and a search for a new CMO will begin soon, Centura officials said.

Spectranetics looking to new market

Spectranetics Corp. is hoping to tap a potential $100 million-a-year market in a new clinical trial started earlier this month.
The trial that uses its medical laser to clear clogged stents in upper-leg arteries and then inserts a plastic-lined stent made by W.L. Gore & Associates Inc. to prevent new blockages. The patients were treated by Dr. Eric Dippel at Midwest Cardiovascular Research in Davenport, Iowa.
Spectranetics Chief Executive John Schulte said last week that the company hopes to sign up 100 patients in the trial by year’s end and gain federal approval for the new therapy. Schulte estimates about 50,000 patients a year could benefit from the therapy.
“It is a big market opportunity. Physicians are looking for a new mechanism for these types of patients,” Schulte said.
The potential new market would be good news for investors, shocked earlier this month when the company’s stock dropped 30 percent after it missed analysts’ fourth-quarter earnings forecasts by 2 cents a share.

Questions arise over hospital choice and shooting victims

E-mails from Penrose-St. Francis Health Services alerting media to the fact that three victims from the Dec. 9 shootings at New Life Church had been transported to Penrose Hospital near downtown Colorado Springs, included this paragraph:

“A significant amount of public and national media requests have been received asking why victims were transported downtown, bypassing the city's two new hospitals. Penrose Main Hospital on Nevada Avenue is a full-service Level II trauma hospital. The new St. Francis Medical Center on the corner of East Woodmen Road and Powers Boulevard will also be a full-service hospital able to handle trauma patients but is not scheduled to open until August 2008.”

What the paragraph omits: The new Memorial Hospital North, which opened in April and is the closest hospital to New Life Church, is operated by Penrose-St. Francis’ competitor and is not equipped to handle trauma patients.

Hospital-linked medical building underway

Construction began July 11 on NorthCare at St. Francis, a physician-owned, 85,250 square-foot medical building that will go up next to the new St. Francis Medical Center, southeast of Powers Boulevard and Woodmen Road in Colorado Springs. Both buildings are scheduled to open in fall 2008. NorthCare at St. Francis will have direct access to the hospital, linked via a fourth floor "skybridge." The four-story, $20 million NorthCare building will sit on more than 5 acres; two-thirds of the building has been pre-leased. The building is being developed by NorthCare LLC, which is headed by Springs physician Dr. Kevin Weary and Michael Heritage of The London Real Estate Group. NorthCare at St. Francis was designed by RTA Architects of Colorado Springs; Colarelli Construction in the Springs is the general contractor.