OSF Healthcare Saint Anthony’s PromptCare and primary care a welcome booster for Godfrey

By DENNIS GRUBAUGH
    A new PromptCare and primary care office building has been opened in Godfrey by OSF Healthcare Saint Anthony’s Health Center — just in time for those seeking to improve their health in the new year.
    The OSF HealthCare medical group primary care office will be located at 6702 Godfrey Road. It is the first in a series of investments planned for the River Bend community, designed to transform health care for residents. The Godfrey facility will include 24 exam rooms and eight OSF HealthCare providers.
    The $5 million, 13,000-square-foot project is a partnership with developer Cornerstone Companies. It is a dual use facility, with primary care teams on one side of the building and urgent care treatment on the other.
    The project broke ground in May and was done in time to start accepting patients in late December.
    “This is part of our broader strategic roadmap with the primary goal of expanding access and care for our patients in the community,” said Ajay Pathak, president and CEO of OSF HealthCare Saint Anthony’s Health Center. “The idea is that we’re taking health care out into the community where people work, where residents live and where they recreate, and do that in a location that’s proximal to schools, areas they commute past and where they go for their careers.”
    PromptCare is the term OSF uses for urgent care. The design of the space — all on a single floor — is based on patient input and what they said is the easiest way to navigate such a facility, Pathak said.
    Location was decided by studying analytics involving patients’ towns, traffic patterns and other factors.
    Primary care is evolving into a new model dealing with the way providers come together to tend to patients. Physicians, advance practice providers, nurses, pharmacists, medical office assistants, dietitians and others come together as a team.
    “Instead of being a patient of ‘Dr. Jones,’ you are a patient of the Jones care team. Depending on what your needs are, if you’re coming in for a routine physical or something more acute or concerning, we make sure that from an access perspective we get you in, in a timely, convenient manner,” Pathak explained.
    The future calls for establishing at least one more of the same kind of office in Saint Anthony’s service area, he said, although nothing is ready to be announced.
    “We are going through the same sort of thought process as we did with the Godfrey site. But our intention is to have another primary care site here in the RiverBend community and looking for the right location for it.”
    Ground should also be broken this spring on a new state-of-the-art cancer center on the Saint Anthony’s campus in Alton.
    Recruitment of additional primary care physicians and providers also continues and has gone well this past year, he said.