RAPID CITY, SD – Rapid City will be home to a new provider in the healthcare market next month – a smaller, micro-style hospital.
Exceptional Health Community Hospital – something akin to a critical access hospital providing essential services while transporting acute patients to other services – will open in early October at 1700 Dyess Avenue, just off East Mall Drive near exit 60 on Interstate 90 ready to admit all inpatient and emergency services.
While it’s a smaller-scale hospital, it has several of the services of the larger hospitals under its roof – eight inpatient rooms for overnight stays, 10 emergency rooms, six fast track rooms which are smaller clinic type rooms for less acute patients, and a full host of services including laboratory, x-ray, pharmacy, kitchen, housekeeping, a helipad, and two operating room suites.
As hospital services expand both in services and in footprint, there’s a niche for the smaller hospital model to provide the necessary care on site quickly and professionally and still be ready to transport a patient if needed, Morgan Newman, Chief Nursing Officer, Exceptional Community Hospital, said.
“Particularly in Rapid those urgent cares have helped but I also thing that what we’ve seen with the data and patient flow there’s still a need for those kind of ERs and micro hospitals,” she said.
Newman said Exceptional hospital plans to bring a different level of customer service to the hospital environment.
“When it gets busy it gets busy (at larger hospitals) wait times can be hours long,” she said. “What we can do as a smaller hospital is see some of the less acute patients or some of the acute patients who present themselves here, we can get them to the services they need at the bigger hospitals.”
What patient numbers will be like after the October opening isn’t known, but Newman said other Exceptional community hospitals opened in similar locations were seeing between 40 and 80 patients a day and still reaching wait time and patient satisfaction goals.
“They’re doing very well with that and that’s what we plan to do here,” she said.
Staffing the hospital is ongoing. Newman said permanent nursing and provider staff was the goal but traveling nurses and locums would be part of the team when the facility opens in October. How many will ultimately be on staff will depend on community needs.
“We’re just going to hire until we say stop because even with our doors opening it’s not a matter of if we grow but when and how fast we’ll grow,” she said.
Exceptional Healthcare has its origins in Texas and is an expanding network of Community Hospitals providing comprehensive Emergency, Trauma, and Inpatient Services and has diversified since the founding of Exceptional Emergency Centers was founded in 2015.
From 2016 to 2020, 13 emergency centers opened across Texas leading to the first Exceptional Community Hospital opening in Maricopa, Arizona in 2021 and the second opening in Yuma, Arizona just a year later. After that, four more hospitals opened in Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma.
In South Dakota, Rapid City will mark the first Exceptional Community Hospital in the upper Midwest.
Newman said the hospital will accept commercial insurance plans, Medicare and Medicaid. Exceptional Health also aims to have patients see a physician within 30 minutes of arriving, based on the company’s model in its other markets.
Morgan Newman, Chief Nursing Officer, Exceptional Community Hospital
