In 2007, Coosa Valley Medical Center celebrated the long-anticipated opening of the West Wing, its new inpatient facility. CEO Glenn Sisk, who began his career years ago as a patient escort at Baptist Montclair, had managed the project from blueprint to completion and was keenly aware of its importance to Coosa Valley.
“The (Coosa Valley) hospital originally opened its doors in 1945, so you can imagine the challenges associated with providing medical care in 62-year-old inpatient rooms,” Sisk said.
Three major additions had been made to the original facility between 1963 and 1980 as the Sylacauga-area population expanded and healthcare expectations changed. Then in 1994, Coosa Valley became part of Baptist Health System.
“Baptist did some fine things in this community,” Sisk said. “They built an ambulatory care center in 1998, which currently houses our emergency department, along with our surgical services, with operating rooms, recovery rooms, a pain clinic and GI lab. Then it created a new façade for the facility: it changed the main entrance, and the admitting department was moved there.”
However, as time passed, Coosa Valley’s biggest test was to “figure out a path that would allow us to build an inpatient hospital,” he said.
“Baptist faced some challenges during that time. They went through some pretty significant changes at the board level and administratively, and they had a lot of people clamoring for access to capital dollars,” Sisk said.
By 2004, the Coosa Valley team had placed a new facility at the top of its priority list.
“The Sylacauga Health Care Authority, which was put together under the Health Care Authority Act of the state back in the early ’80s, had been in place for some time and said to the Baptist leadership, ‘We think you need to help us figure out a way to get a new hospital built, and if there’s a way to get that done with Baptist, we think that’s great. If, on the other hand, that doesn’t seem to be a priority, we would ask for your support for us to go and find a path to make that happen.’”
The board decided to allow Coosa Valley to buy out of Baptist Health System, and the Sylacauga Health Care Authority became the owning and governing entity for the Medical Center.
Coosa Valley signed a letter of intent in late May 2004 to consummate the deal on August 1st, Sisk said, “so we had about 66 days to do everything that was necessary to essentially open a new hospital. It was a lot to get done.”
“We worked feverishly as a management team. We had tremendous support from the board and the team members of the organization to get that accomplished. And on August 1st, as I have said to our team many times, we had more money in our personal banking accounts than this hospital had in its banking account.”
Management then turned its attention to a plan to sell bonds to finance the new facility.
“We put together a team of people who had experience in that arena, with outstanding legal counsel and financial advisers who assisted us in putting together the story,” he said. “The challenging thing for us was the bond markets were not really interested in what had happened historically from a financial operation standpoint, but more so in what our plan was for the future.
“So we put together our story and went to the bond markets, and fortunately our prospects were favorable enough to garner the support necessary to sell bonds to get a number of things accomplished. Not the least of which, of course, was the building of the new inpatient hospital.”
Fortunately, much of the planning had occurred over several years with “a solid team of architects, general contractor partners and subcontractors that knew what we were trying to accomplish,” Sisk said.
So, within 13 months of bringing local decision-making back to the healthcare community in Sylacauga, Coosa Valley broke ground on the 125,000-square-foot facility on September 26, 2005.
“While we have traveled a path over the last three and one half years that is out of the ordinary, we were fortunate not to have inherited a troubled organization,” Sisk said. “However, the steps we took to complete our West Wing Project were vital to the long-term viability of the operation.”
Coming in February: A new era for Coosa Valley Medical Center.
January 2008
