Valley Hospital & Medical Center, which experienced a surge in patients after adding staff last year, is exploring the possibility of expanding, possibly through the construction of a tower, and says construction could begin as early as 2011.

"We're looking very seriously at it," says hospital CEO Dennis Barts. "We have enough space for growth for another year or two at most."

The hospital launched a master-planning process late last year to evaluate how to use its current space more efficiently and to determine how much additional space it might need to meet patient demand over the next five to 10 years, Barts says. It expects to complete that process this spring, and then will begin formulating detailed plans on how to proceed, so it hasn't developed yet any size or cost estimates for a possible expansion, he says.

"We're pretty early in the planning process," Barts says, but he adds, "One thing for certain is we have the capital to invest in whatever we need to build to meet the needs of the people in the Valley, and our hospital is committed to making that happen."

Valley Hospital, located at 12606 E. Mission, is a full-service acute-care facility and level III trauma center that employs about 600 people, counting full- and part-time workers, and has a $43 million annual payroll. It says it now has 167 active medical-staff physicians, after having recruited a dozen additional doctors over the last year, and serves a market area of about 100,000 people that stretches from Mount Spokane to Rockford, Wash., and from about the Interstate 90-Broadway Avenue interchange to Post Falls.

Publicly traded Community Health Systems Inc., based in Franklin, Tenn., acquired most of the assets of Spokane nonprofit Empire Health Services—including Valley Hospital and Deaconess Medical Center—in late 2008 for $156 million. Also it said it would make $100 million in capital improvements at the two hospitals over the next five years.

Valley Hospital opened in 1969, and its last expansion, a $17 million, 53,000-square-foot addition completed about seven years ago, increased its size by about 40 percent.

It sits at the north end of a 10-acre site, bounded by Mission and Boone avenues and Houk and Vercler roads, and about eight acres of that site is vacant or used for parking and is available for future expansion.

Barts emphasizes that any project plan developed would need to obtain local and state regulatory approval before it could proceed.

Valley Hospital is licensed for 123 beds, and currently is using the equivalent of only about 85 beds, Barts says. He adds, though, that patient volume has risen substantially as the hospital has added employees and expanded its services since Community Health Systems Inc. acquired it and Deaconess Medical Center in late 2008.

"We had significant growth last year, and we look forward to maintaining that same growth" in the months and years to come, he says.

"Quite a few days over the last year we've been at 90 to 100 percent of capacity," Barts says, adding that 75 percent to 80 percent occupancy is considered good. Also, he says, the hospital needs to do some remodeling in its outpatient and surgical areas.

The hospital has one wing with unused office space, but that space might not be suitable for conversion to patient rooms or other health-care space because regulatory requirements for such uses have changed dramatically since the hospital was built, he says.

"We made a commitment when we got to the hospital that we were going to try to fully utilize every bed," says Barts, who became the top executive there last March. "We weren't staffing the hospital to the number of beds we had available, and a number of specialties we weren't staffing for in ER. Once we did that, we started filling up beds. It's been significantly stronger."

The hospital strengthened its staffing in orthopedics and pediatrics, as an example, and also now has a robust hospitalist system for providing onsite physician care to admitted patients, he says.

It recently launched a series of weekly complimentary-breakfast meetings and sent out invitations to about 500 community leaders in an effort to raise awareness about initiatives it has launched and progress it has made in areas such as recruiting physicians, acquiring new high-tech equipment, and generally upgrading and expanding services. One of the goals of that breakfast series, Barts says, has been to generate some positive word-of-mouth.

At one of the first of those meetings, held late last month, hospital executives talked about the envisioned expansion, suggesting that it likely would be a tower, and told those attending that architects had begun gathering the data needed to complete the master plan.

Of the possible construction of an addition to the hospital, Barts says, "Whether it will start in 2011, I don't know, but what I do know is we'll know a lot better in the next couple of months. Sometime this year we'll make a decision as to what the expansion should be or what remodeling should be done."