The $17 million expansion project at Valley Hospital & Medical Center wont be fully completed until later this year, but the hospital already has launched a handful of new or upgraded services in its expanded and remodeled space.


In one key effort, the Spokane Valley hospital expects to attract patients who previously would have gone to one of the larger hospitals in downtown Spokane for imaging and catheterization services, says Mike Liepman, Valley Hospitals chief operating officer.


The new or enhanced offerings are expected to help Valley Hospital bring in more revenue. Last year, it suffered operating losses and accounted for part of the financial struggles suffered by its Spokane-based parent, Empire Health Services, which also owns Deaconess Medical Center.


We fully expect to see volume increases, Liepman says. As these volumes start coming our way, its not going to take a lot to see our profitability improve.


Expansion of the hospital, which is located at the southeast corner of Mission Avenue and Houk Road, has involved adding 53,000 square feet of floor space, which will give the hospital a total of about 189,000 square feet of space. Work on the project, which started in 2001, has been completed, with the exception of a remodel of the emergency department.


The completed portion of the project involves expansion of the hospitals radiology department, operating rooms, outpatient-services area, and the addition of an education center.


The major investments in new equipment are located in the expanded radiology department and include a cardiac-catheterization laboratory, a vascular laboratory, and a magnetic-resonance imaging machine.


The new cath and vascular labs are equipped with a $1 million GE Innova Digital Cath Lab machine and a $1 million GE Digital Vascular Lab machine, respectively.


The vascular lab opened first, in late December, and the cath lab came on line late last month. Both provide high-quality digital images, Liepman says. The hospital previously had a combination cath-vascular lab with outdated technology that couldnt provide adequate images for diagnostic cardiac work, such as angiograms.


Addition of that new technology could lead to the hospital offering interventional catheterization procedures.


Liepman says Valley Hospital still is investigating whether to allow physicians to perform such procedures in those labs. He says there is some debate in the medical community regarding whether interventional procedures should be performed in facilities that dont have open-heart surgery capabilities, which Valley Hospital doesnt have.


Other hospitals that dont have open-heart surgery capabilities, including Holy Family Hospital on Spokanes North Side, allow interventional catheterizations, Liepman says. If Valley Hospital did so, it would have emergency transportation standing by, in case a patient suffered complications and required open-heart surgery.


Valley Hospital expects to decide later this year whether it will allow interventional catheterizations.


The hospitals new magnetic-resonance imaging machine, a $2 million GE Excite model, came on line late last month. The device is the first of its kind to be installed at Valley Hospital.


The hospital previously sent patients who needed such tests to Inland Imaging LLCs Valley office, which is located across the street from Valley Hospital. Empire has severed its relationship with Inland Imaging, however, and has opted to begin handling such imaging in-house. Inland Imaging is owned partly by rival hospitals Sacred Heart Medical Center and Holy Family Hospital.


In addition to the new equipment, the expansion area includes a 5,900-square-foot education center with meeting rooms and classrooms that can accommodate 15 to 150 people. The hospital is using those quarters for various meetings and employee-education classes and will allow outside groups to use them for health-care seminars, Liepman says.


The emergency department remodel involves nearly doubling the patient-bed capacity, to 24 from 14, and converting patient rooms that used to house two beds to single-bed rooms.


The big expansion is the first significant construction project at the 35-year-old Valley Hospital since 1983, when the three-story patient-room addition was built.


Valley Hospital has 349 full-time equivalent employees and 123 licensed beds, which makes it smaller than Spokanes other primary-care hospitals, but bigger than specialty centers, such as St. Lukes Rehabilitation Institute and Shriners Hospital for Children-Spokane.