Ivinson Memorial Hospital to offer services at clinic

In May, Health Management Services (HMS) and Platte Valley Clinic finalized a contract with Ivinson Memorial Hospital in Laramie to provide expanded services to the Platte Valley. On June 23, staff from the regional hospital visited the Corbett Medical Center ahead of providing both in-person and telehealth visits.

Holly Zajic, Chief Financial Officer for Ivinson Memorial Hospital, was joined by obstetrics and gynecology specialist Kim Westrbook, Sarah Miles, patient care technician, and Brande DeBree, registered nurse. While the contract was finalized in May, HMS had approached Ivinson Memorial Hospital in late 2019.

"About eight months they came to visit Ivinson Memorial Hospital (to) talk about our provider services that we offer and the scope of services that we could partner with in the Saratoga community," said Zajic.

According to Zajic, those services will include obstetrics, general surgery, ENT (ear, nose and throat), pediatrics, geriatrics and neurology. Additionally, those services will be provided through a combination of clinic visits and telehealth.

"We're excited to offer both services. We're going to hope to have a lot of on-site clinics as well as telehealth when we can't make it over due to weather conditions," Zajic said.

While there will be a number of services that Ivinson Memorial Hospital hopes to provide through Platte Valley Clinic, the first services will be obstetrics.

"We are actually going to be the first team to get started, hopefully in August, if everything gets set up the way we're hoping," said Westbrook. "Our team will send a provider for a women's health clinic remotely once every two weeks to get started and then we'll see how the numbers go."

The ability to provide care to Valley residents in Saratoga is exciting for Westbrook and her team. According to her, the obstetrics department at Ivinson Memorial Hospital sees a number of Carbon County residents.

"About half of our team used to travel to Rawlins, actually, every two weeks and we had a lot of people that came from the Saratoga, Encampment, Riverside area. So we've been talking with our patients about this for probably the last six months in anticipation and everybody-the patients, our staff-we're all pretty excited to get it going," Westbrook said.

She added that patients who have made the trip to Laramie to utilize the obstetric services at Ivinson Memorial Hospital can expect the same level of care when the specialists visit Platte Valley Clinic. With the exception of a few procedures, Westbrook said that the obstetrics team can do most of what they already do in Laramie.

"There are a few procedures that we would not be able to do over here that we would offer only in Laramie but, for the majority of our visits, it would be the exact same just a different location," said Westbrook.

As part of the visit to Corbett Medical Center, the team from Ivinson Memorial Hospital looked at what equipment the Platte Valley Clinic had in place to prepare for what equipment would need to be brought for clinic visits.

"All-in-all, they have a lot of what we're going to need so we won't need to bring nearly as much as we may have had to bring to our old clinic when we were heading over to Rawlins," Westbrook said.

While the team from Ivinson Memorial Hospital appeared excited to be able to provide care for their patients within the Valley, both Mark Pesognelli, Saratoga Care Center and Platte Valley Clinic administrator, and Heidi Sifford, clinic manager, expressed their excitement at seeing the partnership begin to develop.

"It's awesome. We've worked on this for quite some time. We're really looking forward to this partnership and definitely in the future, as the hospital goes in up here, Ivinson's going to move right up and continue to offer the same types of services," said Pesognelli. "It's a very, very good partnership and it will be wonderful for the people of the Valley."

"I'm just excited about the extended healthcare that we're getting out here and we're really thankful for Ivinson for being able to provide that to our patients and really looking forward to having a good continuation of care throughout the entire process," said Sifford. "So, being able to follow up with our patients after seeing specialty providers, this partnership's going to allow us a lot better access for better continuation of care."