State awards Crouse Health $1 million for emergency-services expansion

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — New York has awarded Crouse Health a grant of $1 million for its Pomeroy emergency-services department expansion project. 

The hospital will use the funding to relocate its PromptCare urgent-care facility into the main emergency department (ED), Crouse said in a news release.

PromptCare is currently located across the street from the hospital.

The funding is part of the recently announced grants in the regional economic-development council (REDC) initiative. 

The $38 million Pomeroy emergency-services expansion project will double the space of the current emergency department, according to Crouse.

The project is named in recognition of “major” donors Bill and Sandra Pomeroy.

Crouse is completing its ED expansion project “in phases.” 

Phase 1 will include the expansion of the current ED into adjacent space, which crews will complete by mid-2017. 

The existing PromptCare facility will then be moved from its current location across the street to its new site in the space that the existing ED currently uses. Crouse anticipates crews will complete the entire project in 2018.

Project background
The hospital’s current emergency department is 40 years old and “not optimally configured for today’s environment,” according to Crouse Health.

PromptCare will increase from more than 4,800 square feet to 12,000 square feet, “allowing treatment for a greater number of patients with shorter wait times,” the hospital contends. 

The facility will feature a “rapid evaluation” unit, and will share a physician-staffed triage station with the emergency department, Crouse said. 

The staff will assist incoming patients and direct them to the “proper level of care based on the urgency of their health-care needs,” the hospital added.

Once completed, Crouse will use the expanded ED space for more treatment rooms to provide “enhanced” privacy, space for mental health/substance-abuse evaluations removed from the general ED population, space for hospitalists and care coordinators to meet with ED visitors to review primary-care provider status and to initialize primary-care usage, along with a space for financial advisors to meet with uninsured patients. 

These activities will “link” patients with primary-care providers as an alternative to returning to Crouse’s ED, the hospital said.

Between the main ED and PromptCare, Crouse has treated more than 83,000 patients during 2016. 

The hospital’s total emergency-services volume has increased 60 percent over the past 10 years, and 16 percent in the last four years, Crouse said.

Contact Reinhardt at ereinhardt@cnybj.com