Health Care at Home — Baraga County Memorial Hospital

Baraga County Memorial Hospital in L’Anse is a 15–bed critical access hospital.

It has about 125 employees, eight of whom are physicians.

Eight months ago, the hospital moved from its longtime home on Main Street in downtown L’Anse to US–41.

Staff say the new hospital has been great so far, especially when it comes to outpatient areas.

Director of nursing Becky D’Agostino says they now have a much larger emergency room, with seven beds as opposed to two previously.

She says patients also have a great deal more space and more privacy than they could have had in the old ER.

The new home cost nearly $30 million.

The hospital spared no expense to bring in upgraded technology, especially in the operating room and in radiology services.

CEO Tim Zwickey says they have state-of-the-art radiology technology with MRI, CT and nuclear medicine services, and he says many Baraga County residents don’t know the hospital has them.

Baraga County Memorial also offers another cancer–related area that has seen a boost from the move last year.

D’Agostino says chemotherapy services at the hospital prevent anyone from needing to leave the area for their cancer care.

And there are some new procedures they couldn’t do at the old hospital, such as infusions for oncology patients, which prior to the move patients would have needed to go elsewhere for.

Hospital staff knew for quite some time that potential patients were leaving the area for pediatric services.

So D’Agostino says the hospital recruited an award–winning pediatrician from Indiana who started working there in December.

CEO Tim Zwickey says recruitment at the hospital has changed from when he arrived 13 months ago.

He says that at that time, the hospital hadn’t recruited any new physicians in five or six years.

But they now also have a new family practice doctor scheduled to arrive at the beginning of March.

We’ll examine Bell Hospital in Ishpeming tomorrow night.

Posted by: Mike Hoey