Carbon County’s first new hospital in 65 years will begin taking patients at 7 a.m. today as St. Luke’s University Health Network opens the doors to its $80 million Carbon campus, the biggest such project in Franklin Township’s history.

Local health care officials said they are confident the three-story, 80-patient-room, 160,000-square-foot facility, located near the intersection of Harrity and Fairyland roads, will redefine health care access, convenience and quality for the local population and surrounding areas.

“This complex underscores St. Luke’s commitment to the health and well-being of this community,” says John Nespoli, president of St. Luke’s Lehighton and Carbon campuses. “At St. Luke’s, we believe in providing quality services locally that keep people physically, emotionally and spiritually healthy and help take care of them close to home when they are ill or injured, to ultimately enhance the health status of our neighbors.”

Erica Line, St. Luke’s director of marketing and public relations, said the network wants to provide the Carbon community greater access to surgical services and cancer services support. Services including women’s imaging, mammograms, lung screening, and colon cancer screenings are among the many focal points.

“Our approach in this region is highly comprehensive, which should allow a patient to experience their entire health care journey from primary care to specialized care in vascular, ontological, gynecological, gastroenterological and other specialties all right here in Carbon County without leaving,” Line said.

The Carbon campus will be home to 500 employees during its Phase 1 opening.

Nespoli said the new hospital’s “cool factor” and the trend of young professionals wanting to move to rural areas with activities such as kayaking, biking, etc., have combined to make Carbon County a popular destination for health care workers.

“We have recruited 30 new doctors since St. Luke’s came into Carbon County,” he said.

“We have a surgical oncologist who went to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, one of the best training programs in the world. She had offers at Johns Hopkins Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, and could have gone anywhere in the world. She is here with us full-time. That story repeats itself about 20 times with those kinds of people coming into our community.”

Hospital features

When designing the hospital, St. Luke’s officials said, thoughtful accessibility for patients and families was a priority. The layout includes registration, diagnostic testing, a cafe and elevators within steps of entering the main lobby.

“We wanted a one-stop registration process,” Nespoli said. “A lot of places have multiple registration areas. This covers everything from imaging to cardiology and all of the outpatient areas.”

Rick’s Café, named after St. Luke’s President and Chief Executive Officer Rick Anderson, offers a variety of culinary options to both community members and hospital staff.

“This isn’t just for the staff, it’s for the community,” Nespoli said. “The food is great, and we’re going to have an app, where you can custom order your food in advance and pick it up, kind of like a Wawa. The staff loves it because it saves them a lot of time on their lunch break.”

Artwork throughout the building shows different scenes of Carbon County. Many of the images are photographs taken by St. Luke’s team members.

“As you look down the corridor of our radiology and cardiology testing areas, we have four pictures of the same scene from Mauch Chunk Lake, one taken during each season,” said Joseph Pinto, chief operating officer of St. Luke’s Carbon County and Sacred Heart Hospitals.

A particular focus while designing the hospital, Pinto said, was cutting down on how much time patients would wait for tests and subsequent results. As the husband of a breast cancer survivor, one area that hit close to home for him is women’s imaging.

“With any test, if you get an abnormal result, your brain goes to ‘uh-oh, what is next?’?” Pinto said. “A woman can come in here and get a screening mammography, a diagnostic test and then a biopsy all in the same day. There is nothing like that in the area. The results come back within 48 hours. It’s incredible.”

All patient rooms are private, and each is outfitted with a wall-mounted, 55-inch smart TV to facilitate two-way audio/visual communication between patients and their providers anywhere, as well as patients and their family members worldwide.

Real-time computer system-linked digital whiteboards in patient rooms will display the names of the patient’s caregivers, day of the week, scheduled activities and other useful safety information.

Life-Aire air purification systems have been installed in the air ducts throughout the hospital’s treatment areas to kill all air pathogens, including COVID-19 and anthrax.

An attendant in the St. Luke’s-created TechConnect help center in the lobby will give free-of-charge assistance to patients, visitors and community members struggling to learn or use personal digital or medical symptom-monitoring devices or apps.

Wellness resources on the new campus will offer safe, tranquil and convenient opportunities for improving one’s health through fitness, health education and nutrition. A fitness-walking trail that encircles the complex will offer staff, patients and visitors the opportunity to exercise in a bucolic setting bordered by picturesque mountains and an organic farm, or to seek solace in a lavender and sunflower meditation and healing garden.

USDA rural development

chief gets tour

On Friday morning, Bob Morgan, state director for the United States Department of Agriculture Rural Development, toured the Carbon campus.

St. Luke’s received a $98.5 million direct USDA loan for the project and a $16 million guaranteed loan.

“What happens is St. Luke’s able to use us as a funding agent,” Morgan said. “We’re not giving away the money. We’re just a lender, a major lender in the project. And it allows companies like St. Luke’s and other health care providers to provide opportunities for people in rural parts of Pennsylvania to achieve the same level of health care that metropolitan areas can achieve. “

Morgan called USDA’s investment in the Carbon campus “significant,” noting that local residents will no longer have to travel out of the area to receive state-of-the-art health care.

“This is a big economic driver in the community,” he said. “If you have an opportunity to locate a new facility, one of the things that you want to provide is not only great health care, but the ability to receive that without having to travel great distances. And so this makes this is it’s an improvement obviously, for the people that live here now, but it also can be an improvement for the people who may move here and it makes Carbon County more attractive in the economic marketplace.”

Next phases for Carbon and Lehighton campuses

Ground will be broken next spring for a three-story, 60,000-square-foot medical office building connected to the hospital. Cancer, cardiac, orthopedics care, pain management and physical therapy services and physicians’ offices will occupy this facility, along with a full fitness center and more. This facility will be opened in early 2023.

St. Luke’s said it vows to continue its “commitment to community” at its Lehighton Campus, the former Gnaden Huetten Memorial Hospital on North 12th Street.

The campus will undergo a renovation and expansion of behavioral health services.

Essential patient services remaining at the Lehighton campus will be a medical office building, radiology, laboratory draws, infusion, wound care, pulmonary function testing, cardiac/pulmonary rehabilitation, behavioral health, acute care rehabilitation and inpatient rehabilitation.