‘It’s our mission to bring that care home’: Mon Health Marion Neighborhood Hospital treats first patient

WHITE HALL – A bit of cardiac convergence was in the neighborhood here Tuesday morning.

At 8:17 a.m., to be precise.

That was when the doors of Mon Health Marion Neighborhood Hospital opened – so an elderly man could walk in.

“Now,” hospital administrator Kelly Zimmerman said, as the medical team uncoiled. “It’s real. Our first patient.”

The 10-bed facility is the newest Mountain State arm of Morgantown-based Mon Health System. Tuesday was its first day of business.

While the hospital is small in scale, it still has a big resume, said Dr. Chris Edwards, an emergency room physician who will help staff the place.

“We can treat whatever walks through the door,” he said.

Patient No. 1 presented with chest pains, just 17 minutes into the inaugural workday.

That simple act of showing up at an accessible facility, Edwards said, carried medical implications – of the good kind.

And that’s because Marion County, previously, had been hospital-poor for decades.

Now-defunct Fairmont General Hospital, which had been the region’s lone, full-service hospital, repeatedly languished under the umbrella of absent, corporate landlords before its demise.  

The hospital’s final owners, in fact, shuttered the place in March 2020, at the height of the pandemic’s first surge.

County residents long before had grown accustomed to motoring to Morgantown or Clarksburg – a 20-minute hop down Interstate 79 either way – for doctor’s appointments, hospital stays, surgeries and other treatment.

Especially hospital stays, surgeries and other treatment, Edwards said.

Heart attack or stroke? Let the logistics begin, he said.

A family member could drive you to Clarksburg or Morgantown, with traffic lights and speed-limit signs factoring in the whole way.

Or, you could be trundled into the back of an ambulance, which might not be that much better, if it snows or there’s road construction.

There’s always the medical helicopter, with its dependence upon landing zones and the whims of the crosswinds.

“We can treat you here,” Edwards said. “Or, we can get you stabilized, if you have to go down the road.”

Edwards likes the fact that its in-house labs and other diagnostic services will provide for the full-range of necessary workups, from complete metabolic profiles to liver panels, ultrasounds and screenings of every stripe.

In recent days, the new hospital in White Hall has gotten notice in Washington, D.C., by way of the state’s senior lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

Last month, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., visited the hospital to praise its operations plan, which she said can be a national model for rural care delivery in pandemic and uncertain economic times.

Last week, her counterpart, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., came calling to cut the ribbon – and to offer the same praise. He also brought U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra with him.

Meanwhile, Ron Stovash, who chairs Mon Health’s board of directors, said he’ll sing from that hymnal of health care every day.

“That’s why we call it a ‘neighborhood hospital,’ ” he said.

“So many of our rural areas are losing their hospitals and health care. It’s our mission to bring that care home.”

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