OSU Medical Center opens Gahanna CarePoint

The Ohio State University Medical Center's CarePoint location in Gahanna opened officially Dec. 13 at U.S. Route 62 and Hamilton Road.

CarePoint brought OSU's family practitioners, the cardiovascular medicine program and physical therapy program under one roof, also adding new programs in neurology, orthopedics, obstetrics and gynecology, podiatry and sports medicine.

"Our goal was to provide a continuum of services under one roof," said Dan Like, chief operating officer of ambulatory services.

Like said the new facility houses imaging equipment to provide X-ray services and MRI services.

OSU studied the area's medical needs in a strategic plan recently and found Gahanna's demographic for family-oriented care would benefit from a facility such as CarePoint, where a person could see a family physician and be referred to another specialty physician or have X-rays done in the same building.

To meet that need, OSU worked with existing physicians to move them to the new building and recruited other physicians to move into the area.

For the sports medicine program at CarePoint, OSU has an existing physician offering clinic hours, and OSU recruited additional physicians to expand the program, Like said.

"We did not building this building and then try to lease space," he said.

Instead OSU decided what services the community needed and then built the facilities to include those services.

Doug Flowers, director of media relations for the OSU Medical Center, said CarePoint provides "state-of-the-art outpatient care in a community setting, with easy access and free parking."

CarePoint is in the former Big Bear location, with about 56,000 square feet of space.

This is OSU Medical Center's second facility developed after the strategic plan was completed. The first was the Eye and Ear Institute on Olentangy Road, which opened in June. Like said it is similar to CarePoint in that patients who go there to see an eye doctor could return to the same building to have surgery.

"We're promoting convenience for our patients," he said.

The third facility being developed under the auspices of the strategic plan is a 30,000-square-foot building on Lewis Center Road. It also will offer family practitioners, general internal medicine, physical therapy and sports medicine.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony for CarePoint was held in Gahanna on Dec. 13. The project is expected to add 20 new jobs in the first year, Flowers said.

lwince@thisweeknews.com