Dozens of health care professionals and other interested individuals showed up on Tuesday, Nov. 5 at the new building at 240 S. Willard St. in Cottonwood, just steps away from Verde Valley Medical Center. After seeing brief speeches from executives at Northern Arizona Healthcare, including President Florence Spyrow and Chief Administrative Officer Ronald Haase, a large ribbon was cut by a pair of oversize novelty scissors, and the building — previously Verde Valley Medical Imaging Center — was christened Northern Arizona Healthcare Medical Group and Northern Arizona Healthcare Medical Imaging Center.
Beyond the name change and a brand new set of renovations that made the floors, walls, furniture and amenities look brand new, the new center will serve as a consolidation of the hospital system’s outpatient offices for the area within one building. Around 120 staff members — including doctors, nurses and other support staff — will work in the building’s two floors, providing care in primary care, general surgery, imaging, orthopedics, women’s medicine, urology, gastroenterology, palliative care, neurology, endocrinology and internal medicine.
“It really creates a continuity of care,” NAH External Communication Coordinator Sophia Papa said. “If someone needed to go see a primary care doctor, and then they needed a specialist like a urologist or neurologist, it’s all in the same building. It’s much easier for the patient.”
The building is aimed at serving the whole Verde Valley, and NAH has discussed plans for a future Immediate Care facility, similar to what recently opened in Camp Verde.
Consolidating all these services into one centralized location allowed the NAH to close several offices off their campus, such as those on Manzanita Drive and South Candy Lane in Cottonwood,
which the medical corporation hopes will save them on rental costs as well.
“It’s all here under one roof,” Jannienne Jones- Verse, Chief of Strategy for NAH, said. “You’re able to leave here with a fuller experience. The most important part of that is collaborative care and comprehensive care.”
One of the major goals of having all the different outpatient services in the same building will be to allow medical professionals to work together on a certain patient’s care, being able to communicate directly within the building, and allowing the patient to meet with multiple specialists in the same visit to the center.
“Physicians and providers who have been here for any length of time have been talking about this,” said Celeste Scalf, a nurse practitioner who is director of operations for NAH primary care. “We want our communities to have access to the care that they need. It improves patient care any time that you standardize processes and you put everything together or reduce variation — all of those types of things help improve patient care. The physicians and providers work very closely with the project manager.”
