Sanford plans to spend more than $2.1 million to add 10,327 square feet of space to the clinic at 3955 56th St. S., bringing it to more than 16,000 square feet.
Sixteen pediatric physicians and other providers, most of them now working in the downtown hospital, will move to the southwest Fargo clinic, joining the eight family health and pediatric physicians and providers already there, said Cyndy Skorick, Sanford Health’s executive director of women’s and children’s primary care.
“The timeline is to have everything open (and) ready that first week of December, so sometime before Christmas.” she said Thursday, April 15.
Most of the caregivers moving to the Veterans Square Clinic are already practicing downtown, “but we’ve had such a growth in our children’s providers and specialities that we want to really create more of a destination location for our children’s specialists and children’s primary care,” Skorick said.
In addition, most of the incoming physicians also practice at Sanford’s Children’s Hospital about two miles north near the intersection of Veterans Boulevard and Interstate 94, “so it’s a nice, convenient location for seeing hospital and clinic patients,” she said.
The clinic will take up six more bays in the strip mall, which will be used for 32 more exam rooms and spaces for consultations and the providers.
Specialties being added or expanded at the site include pediatric neurology, pediatric nephrology (kidney care medicine), pediatric gastroenterology and pediatric endocrinology. There will also be specialists in sleep medicine, infectious diseases and behavior health, as well as lactation services for mothers. The clinic will also have telemedicine and telehealth capabilities, Skorick said.
Veterans Square is in a fast-growing section of the Fargo-Moorhead metro area with many surrounding housing developments. Skorick said the strip mall clinic, opened in June 2019 with a focus on family practice and pediatrics, helped Sanford to create a “neighborhood presence,” and put care “where the families are.” She said it may be possible that similar strip mall clinics will follow.
The clinic is designed for “self rooming” patient intake, much like Sanford’s Moorhead Clinic. Patients are welcomed at a kiosk, where they are given a tag and assigned a room to wait. The patient then goes to the room and the tag alerts the nurse and providers that the patient is there.
Expanding the pediatric presence at Veterans Square also allows Sanford to continue with its construction at the Broadway campus and the expansion of the Roger Maris Cancer Center, Skorick said.
