Legacy Salmon Creek turns 10

Then: In the first full fiscal year, Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center had about 80 patients in the hospital on any given day.

Now: This year, the hospital is on track to double that average — some days counting about 180 patients.

Then: Legacy Salmon Creek treated about 34,000 patients a year in the emergency department.

Now: Hospital officials expect to treat more than 70,000 patients this year.

Then: Legacy Salmon Creek delivered about 1,700 babies the first full year it was open.

Now: The hospital is on track to deliver nearly 3,500 babies this year.

Then: Legacy Salmon Creek did nine surgeries the first month it was open.

Now: The hospital does about 500 surgical cases per month.

Then: Before opening, Legacy received 4,000 applications to fill 650 positions.

Now: Legacy Salmon Creek employs between 1,200 and 1,300 people.

Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center celebrated its 10th birthday with a round of the “Happy Birthday” song — not for the hospital, but for its first patient, Breanna Bullion.

Breanna was the guest of honor at Legacy Salmon Creek’s birthday party Thursday evening — an event held in conjunction with the Greater Vancouver Chamber of Commerce’s Business After Hours. One of the nurses who cared for Breanna as an infant presented the birthday girl with a stuffed giraffe — a red bow, affixed with a Legacy “employee” badge, tied around its neck — that stood nearly as tall as the girl.

When the hospital opened its doors Aug. 22, 2005, Breanna was just 9 days old. She was born seven weeks’ premature and spent the first days of her life in the neonatal intensive care unit at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland.

With the Salmon Creek hospital just days from opening, Legacy officials decided to transfer Breanna so her parents wouldn’t have to travel as far to be with their newborn. Breanna arrived a few minutes after the hospital opened its doors to patients for the first time.

Like the hospital, the La Center girl is now 10 years old and thriving.

“They gave her a great start,” Breanna’s mom, Laurel Bullion, said of the hospital staff.

Legacy Salmon Creek got off to a great start, as well, and has continued to grow in the last decade. Since opening, Legacy’s number of daily patients, emergency room visits and delivered babies have all doubled — making the Salmon Creek hospital the busiest of all Legacy Health hospitals for ER visits and births.

“The Clark County community has been an amazing place for Legacy to go and be embraced,” said Jonathan Avery, the former chief administrative officer of Legacy Salmon Creek, during a recent interview with The Columbian. Avery left Salmon Creek in January 2014 and is now the chief administrative officer at Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center in Portland.

In 2005, Legacy Health opened the first hospital in the state in more than 25 years. The six-story, 460,000-square-foot hospital and 180,000-square-foot medical office complex cost $285 million. When the hospital opened, the sixth floor was an unfinished shell, giving the hospital room to grow into its 220-bed capacity.

“The original plan was in five to seven years to open those,” Avery said. “We ended up opening those in 2009 because the growth was so extraordinary in years two through four.”

The $20 million build-out created four new 16-bed units dedicated to neuroscience and total joint replacement.

Avery attributes much of that early growth to the reputation Legacy built in the community — both among patients and providers.

“One of the key drivers was patients and families choosing to go to Salmon Creek,” Avery said.

Legacy also quickly established partnerships with local physician groups, particularly The Vancouver Clinic and Rebound, Avery said. Six months after Legacy opened, The Vancouver Clinic opened its Salmon Creek office adjacent to the hospital.

“That was a driver for our growth,” Avery said.

In 2013, Legacy Salmon Creek experienced another surge in growth. That year, Kaiser Permanente signed a contract with Legacy Salmon Creek — ending a long-standing relationship with PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center — and began sending its 100,000 Clark County patients to Legacy.

“It had a huge impact on the hospital, basically overnight,” Avery said.

Legacy launched a $7 million upgrade that added new patient rooms to the Family Birth Center and created a new intermediate care unit, which is considered a step-down from the intensive care unit. Legacy hired nearly 200 employees to care for the new patients.

The addition of Kaiser patients helped to drive up the Salmon Creek hospital’s birth and emergency department numbers. Prior to the Kaiser contract, Legacy Salmon Creek staff were delivering about 2,200 babies a year. Now, they deliver about 3,500 babies each year.

“Kaiser really pushed Salmon Creek to its maximum point pretty quickly,” Avery said.

That’s not to say Legacy officials don’t have plans to continue growing.

“A really important area of expansion for us is cancer care,” said Bryce Helgerson, Legacy Salmon Creek’s chief administrative officer since January 2014.

Next month, Legacy is bringing the OHSU Knight-Legacy Health Cancer Collaborative — an integrated community cancer program for radiation oncology, medical oncology and infusion services — to Salmon Creek.

Gynecologic oncologists will join the Legacy Salmon Creek staff in September to provide services to local women, and Legacy will continue to build upon the cancer program in the next year, Helgerson said. The goal is to provide the services that Clark County residents are currently going out of the area to receive, closer to home, he said.

Legacy Salmon Creek will also continue to build its total joint and orthopedic program, Helgerson said.

“Statewide, in Oregon and Washington, the number of patients who come from out of our primary service area for that care is off the charts,” he said.

In the next year, Salmon Creek also plans to built out its last two operating rooms — room Nos. 9 and 10 — to accommodate growing surgical numbers and expand the hospital’s robotic technology. The hospital is also in the middle of a $250,000 fundraising campaign to build a healing garden and is awaiting approval from the state to add interventional cardiology services, which involve catheter-based treatments.

Next week, Legacy Health — in partnership with GoHealth Urgent Care — will open its first Clark County urgent care clinic in Cascade Park, with plans to open two more clinics in the next few years. And, later this fall, Salmon Creek will launch its new Get Well Network, an interactive patient education and entertainment program in hospital rooms.

Legacy officials are also looking for ways to accommodate more patients at the hospital. To meet growing emergency department demand, hospital officials are looking at how they can use short-stay rooms for emergency treatment in the evenings.

“We’re trying to be really creative with the space we have and utilize it most efficiently,” Helgerson said. “But there will be a time when we have to look at an expansion for the hospital.”

No expansion plans are currently in the works, though, he said.