Trinity Health System To Build New Hospital In Underserved Ohio Community

Trinity will be breaking ground on the new facility this summer and the $12 million project is expected to be completed in 24-months.

Trinity Health System—which is part of CommonSpirit Health, a nonprofit, Catholic health system—has secured the funding and property needed to expand its presence in the Midwest with the construction of a 20,000 square foot neighborhood hospital in St. Clairsville, Ohio.

Since 2019, three of the five hospitals in and around Belmont County—where St. Clairsville is located—have closed, severely limiting healthcare access to the people in that community. The closest emergency room is about 20-minutes from St. Clairsville, according to Trinity Health System CEO Matt Grimshaw. The organization saw an opportunity to bring ER and other needed medical services to this underserved market.

"We started looking at the different models of care out there and wanted to figure out what the sweet spot in the new world of healthcare would be," Grimshaw says. "What we learned we needed was ERs, CT scanners, overnight beds, and surgery access. In modeling out the efficiencies you can gain in a small state of the art facility, we think this is a great model for cost effective care and access."

Trinity will be breaking ground on the new facility this summer and the $12 million project is expected to be completed in 24-months. Funding for the hospital is coming from the Trinity Health System Foundation, which relies on outside donations to help improve the facilities within the system and offer greater access to care.

"Building a small footprint neighborhood hospital that doesn’t have all of the overhead and space of the legacy buildings spread across the country really is geared toward the future of healthcare," Grimshaw says. "Fewer and fewer services are requiring long hospital stays. The future of healthcare is convenience, it is not giant hospitals. It is telemedicine, it is improved access, and it's finding cost-effective ways to deliver care in a world of scarce resources.”